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Data without generalization is just gossip.

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
Generalization
Gossip
Data
Without

More quotes by Robert M. Pirsig

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When somebody goes outside the cultural norms, the culture has to protect itself.
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We always condemn most in others, he thought, that which we most fear in ourselves.
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There is an evil tendency underlying all our technology - the tendency to do what is reasonable even when it isn't any good.
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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.
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The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands.
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What I mean (and everybody else means) by the word 'quality' cannot be broken down into subjects and predicates. This is not because Quality is so mysterious but because Quality is so simple, immediate and direct.
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The most moral activity of all is the creation of space for life to move around.
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The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality, not the other way around.
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Boredom always precedes a period of great creativity.
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No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow.
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Between the subject and the object lies the value.
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A culture that supports the dominance of social values over biological values is an absolutely superior culture to one that does not, and a culture that supports the dominance of intellectual values over social values is absolutely superior to one that does not.
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Objects are inorganic and biological values subjects are social and intellectual values.
Robert M. Pirsig
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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.
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The Good was not a form of reality. It was reality itself, ever-changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed, rigid way.
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The major producer of the social chaos, the indeterminacy of thought and values that rational knowledge is supposed to eliminate, is none other than science itself.
Robert M. Pirsig
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I think metaphysics is good if it improves everyday life otherwise forget it.
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.
Robert M. Pirsig
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It is always good policy to tell the truth unless of course you are an exceptionally good liar. Jerome K. Jerome It is a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, go away, I'm looking for the truth. and so it goes away. Puzzling.
Robert M. Pirsig
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Physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance.
Robert M. Pirsig