Quote

Substance is a subspecies of value. When you reverse the containment process and define substance in terms of value the mystery disappears: substance is a stable pattern of inorganic values. The problem then disappears. The world of objects and the world of values is unified.

Robert M. Pirsig

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Robert M. Pirsig
Age: 88 †
Born: 1928
Born: September 6
Died: 2017
Died: April 24
Autobiographer
Novelist
Philosopher
Writer
Minneapolis
Minnesota
Robert Maynard Pirsig
Value
Stable
Subspecies
Term
Define
Inorganic
Values
Substance
Process
Disappear
Containment
Problem
Patterns
Unified
World
Terms
Disappears
Mystery
Pattern
Objects
Reverse

More quotes by Robert M. Pirsig

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Who really can face the future? All you can do is project from the past, even when the past shows that such projections are often wrong. And who really can forget the past? What else is there to know?
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Only social patterns can control biological patterns, and the instrument of conversation between society and biology is not words. The instrument of conversation between society and biology has always been a policeman or a soldier and his gun.
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The solutions all are simple - after you have arrived at them. But they're simple only when you know already what they are.
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The intelligence of the mind can't think of any reason to live, but it goes on anyway because the intelligence of the cells can't think of any reason to die.
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Boredom always precedes a period of great creativity.
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Is it hard?' Not if you have the right attitudes. Its having the right attitudes thats hard.
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We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with the emphasis on good rather than on time.
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Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.
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If your mind is truly, profoundly stuck, then it might be much better off than when it was loaded with ideas
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Now, to take that which has caused us to create the world, and include it within the world we have created, is clearly impossible. This is why Quality cannot be defined. If we do define it, we are defining something less than Quality itself.
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The logic of science was infallible, and if the scientists were sometimes mistaken, this was assumed to be only from their mistaking its rules.
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Within a Metaphysics of Quality, science is a set of static intellectual patterns describing this reality, but the patterns are not the reality they describe.
Robert M. Pirsig
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The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you actually don’t know.
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Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place. There is no other reality.
Robert M. Pirsig
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One of the most moral acts is to create a space in which life can move forward.
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The number of hypotheses available to explain any given phenomenon is infinite.
Robert M. Pirsig
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For me, a writer should be more like a lighthouse keeper, just out there by himself. He shouldn't get his ideas from other people all around him.
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The best students always are flunking. Every good teacher knows that.
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Between the subject and the object lies the value.
Robert M. Pirsig
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We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.
Robert M. Pirsig