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So round and round you go, spinning mental wheels and nowhere finding anyplace to get traction. What the hell...is it?

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
Finding
Anyplace
Mental
Traction
Hell
Spinning
Wheels
Nowhere
Round
Rounds
Findings

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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 more you read, the more you calm down.
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Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place. There is no other reality.
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Data without generalization is just gossip.
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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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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.
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If you run from technology, it will chase you.
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When a shepherd goes to kill a wolf, and takes his dog to see the sport, he should take care to avoid mistakes. The dog has certain relationships to the wolf the shepherd may have forgotten.
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When somebody goes outside the cultural norms, the culture has to protect itself.
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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?
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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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Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster.
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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.
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The real cycle you're working on is a cycle called yourself.
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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 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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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.
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Squareness is such a uniquely intellectual disease.
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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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In the temple of science are many mansions ... and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them thither.
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