Quote

Education should not be fun. You are being brought up into society and society has a way of doing things. It may not be pleasant but sooner or later you are going to have to do it anyway.

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
Later
Fun
Education
Society
May
Sooner
Going
Pleasant
Way
Anyway
Things
Brought

More quotes by Robert M. Pirsig

Image
Good is a noun rather than an adjective.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn't any other test. If the machine produces tranquility it's right. If it disturbs you it's wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
What I am is a heretic who's recanted, and thereby in everyone's eyes saved his soul. Everyone's eyes but one, who knows deep down inside that all he has saved is his skin.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
Physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
I really am a recluse. I just enjoy watching the wind blow through the trees. In America someone who sits around and does that is at the bottom of the ladder, but in Japan, say, someone who goes up into the mountains is accorded great respect. I guess I am somewhere in between. I enjoy reclusion: it clears my mind.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
Is it hard?' Not if you have the right attitudes. Its having the right attitudes thats hard.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
We always condemn most in others, he thought, that which we most fear in ourselves.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
Mental reflection is so much more interesting than TV it's a shame more people don't switch over to it.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
There's so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
One thing about pioneers that you don't hear mentioned is that they are invariably, by their nature, mess-makers. They go forging ahead, seeing only their noble, distant goal, and never notice any of the crud and debris they leave behind them.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
Great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose.
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
What is seen now so much more clearly is that although the names keep changing and the bodies keep changing, the larger pattern that holds us all together goes on and on.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
A motorcycle functions entirely in accordance with the laws of reason, and a study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
Squareness is such a uniquely intellectual disease.
Robert M. Pirsig
Image
The funny thing about insane people is that it is kind of the opposite of being a celebrity. Nobody envies you.
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
When you've got a Chautauqua in your head, it's extremely hard not to inflict it on innocent people.
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