Quote

To an experienced Zen Buddhist, asking if one believes in Zen or one believes in the Buddha, sounds a little ludicrous, like asking if one believes in air or water. Similarly Quality is not something you believe in, Quality is something you experience.

Robert M. Pirsig

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Robert M. Pirsig
Age: 88 †
Born: 1928
Born: September 6
Died: 2017
Died: April 24
Autobiographer
Novelist
Philosopher
Writer
Minneapolis
Minnesota
Robert Maynard Pirsig
Believe
Asking
Similarly
Like
Quality
Buddha
Sound
Experienced
Water
Buddhist
Experience
Believes
Littles
Unity
Little
Sounds
Something
Air
Ludicrous

More quotes by Robert M. Pirsig

Image
Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organize themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive?
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
I really don't mind dying because I figure I haven't wasted this life.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
The more you read, the more you calm down.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
Institutions such as schools, churches, governments and political organizations of every sort all tended to direct thought for ends other than truth, for the perpetuation of their own functions, and for the control of individuals in the service of these functions.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
Quality isn't a thing. It is an event.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
Quality tends to fan out like waves. The Quality job he didn't think anyone was going to see was seen, and the person who feels it is a little bit better because of it, and is likely to pass that feeling onto others, and in that way the Quality tends to keep going.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
Science values static patterns.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
It's better not to see than to see wrongly.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
Cultivate peace of mind which does not separate one's self from one's surroundings. When that is done successfully, then everything else follows naturally.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with the emphasis on good rather than on time.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha - which is to demean oneself.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
The real cycle you're working on is a cycle called yourself.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
The Church of Reason, like all institutions of the System, is based not on individual strength but upon individual weakness. What's really demanded in the Church of Reason is not ability, but inability. Then you are considered teachable. A truly able person is always a threat.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
The number of hypotheses available to explain any given phenomenon is infinite.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
It's nice to start journeys pleasantly, even when you know they won't end that way.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
Talk about rationality can get very confusing unless the things with which rationality deals are also included.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
Cliches and stereotypes such as beatnik or hippie have been invented for the antitechnologists, the antisystem people, and will continue to be. But one does not convert individuals into mass people with the simple coining of a mass term.
Robert M. Pirsig