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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.
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
Else
Subjects
Cannot
Broken
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Everybody
Situation
Predicates
Quality
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Immediate
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Mysterious
Means
Direct
More quotes by Robert M. Pirsig
Although motorcycle riding is romantic, motorcycle maintenance is purely classic.
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One could almost define life as the organized disobedience of the law of gravity. One could show that the degree to which an organism disobeys this law is a measure of its degree of evolution.
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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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The best students always are flunking. Every good teacher knows that.
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When somebody goes outside the cultural norms, the culture has to protect itself.
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Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20 - 20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go.
Robert M. Pirsig
The world comes to us in an endless stream of puzzle pieces that we would like to think all fit together somehow, but that in fact never do.
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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
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
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.
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The real evil isn't the objects of technology but the tendency of technology to isolate people into lonely attitudes of objectivity. It's the objectivity, the dualistic way of looking at things underlying technology, that produces the evil.
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We always condemn most in others, he thought, that which we most fear in ourselves.
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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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One of the most moral acts is to create a space in which life can move forward.
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Stuckness shouldn't be avoided. It's the physic predecessor of all real understanding.
Robert M. Pirsig
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.
Robert M. Pirsig
Programs of a political nature are important end products of social quality that can be effective only if the underlying structure of social values is right. The social values are right only if the individual values are right. The place to improve the world is first in one's heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.
Robert M. Pirsig
Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food.
Robert M. Pirsig
We’re in such a hurry most of the time we never get much chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it’s all gone.
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For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.
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