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Robert M. Pirsig
116 quotes
“Art is anything you can do well. Anything you can do with Quality.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) first seen 1974 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: NPR Interview with Pirsig (1974)
“Making... an art out of your technological life is the way to solve the problem of technology.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) first seen 1974 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: NPR Interview (1974)
“What follows is based on actual occurrences. Although much has been changed for rhetorical purposes, it must be regarded in its essence as fact. However, it should in no way be associated with that great body of factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice. It's not very factual on motorcycles, either.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car you're always in a compartment, and because you're used to it you don't realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You're a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The world of underlying form is an unusual object of discussion because it is actually a mode of discussion itself. You discuss things in terms of their immediate appearance or you discuss them in terms of their underlying form, and when you try to discuss these modes of discussion you get involved in what could be called a platform problem. You have no platform from which to discuss them other than the modes themselves.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You look at where you're going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you've been and a pattern seems to emerge. And if you project forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In recent times we have seen a huge split develop between a classic culture and a romantic counterculture—two worlds growingly alienated and hateful toward each other with everyone wondering if it will always be this way, a house divided against itself.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When you look directly at an insane man all you see is a reflection of your own knowledge that he's insane, which is not to see him at all. To see him you must see what he saw and when you are trying to see the vision of an insane man, an oblique route is the only way to come at it.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It took me more than a week to deduce from the evidence around me that everything before my waking up was a dream and everything afterward was reality. There was no basis for distinguishing the two other than the growing pile of new events that seemed to argue against the drunk experience. Little things appeared, like the locked door, the outside of which I could never remember seeing. And a slip of paper from the probate court telling me that some person was committed as insane. Did they mean me?”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They had made the mistake of thinking of a personality as some sort of possession, like a suit of clothes, which a person wears. But apart from a personality what is there? Some bones and flesh. A collection of legal statistics, perhaps, but surely no person. The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality, not the other way around.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Talk about rationality can get very confusing unless the things with which rationality deals are also included.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are at the classic-romantic barrier now, where on one side we see a cycle as it appears immediately—and this is an important way of seeing it—and where on the other side we can begin to see it as a mechanic does in terms of underlying form—and this is an important way of seeing things too. These tools for example—this wrench—has a certain romantic beauty to it, but its purpose is always purely classical. It's designed to change the underlying form of the machine.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That's all the motorcycle is, a system of concepts worked out in steel. There's no part in it, no shape in it, that is not out of someone's mind”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I've noticed that people who have never worked with steel have trouble seeing this—that the motorcycle is primarily a mental phenomenon. They associate metal with given shapes—pipes, rods, girders, tools, parts—all of them fixed and inviolable, and think of it as primarily physical. But a person who does machining or foundry work or forge work or welding sees "steel" as having no shape at all. Steel can be any shape you want if you are skilled enough, and any shape but the one you want if you are not.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“These shapes are all out of someone's mind. That's important to see. The steel? Hell, even the steel is out of someone's mind. There's no steel in nature. Anyone from the Bronze Age could have told you that. All nature has is a potential for steel. There's nothing else there. But what's "potential"? That's also in someone's mind!”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The number of rational hypotheses that can explain any given phenomenon is infinite.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think present-day reason is an analogue of the flat earth of the medieval period. If you go too far beyond it you're presumed to fall off, into insanity. And people are very much afraid of that. I think this fear of insanity is comparable to the fear people once had of falling off the edge of the world. Or the fear of heretics. There's a very close analogue there.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What's happening is that each year our old flat earth of conventional reason becomes less and less adequate to handle the experiences we have and this is creating widespread feelings of topsy-turviness. As a result we're getting more and more people in irrational areas of thought—occultism, mysticism, drug changes and the like—because they feel the inadequacy of classical reason to handle what they know are real experiences.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A rush of wind comes furiously now, down from the mountaintop. "The ancient Greeks," I say, "who were the inventors of classical reason, knew better than to use it exclusively to foretell the future. They listened to the wind and predicted the future from that. That sounds insane now. But why should the inventors of reason sound insane?”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think metaphysics is good if it improves everyday life; otherwise forget it.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Any philosophic explanation of Quality is going to be both false and true precisely because it is a philosophic explanation. The process of philosophic explanation is an analytic process, a process of breaking something down into subjects and predicates. 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 (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Now, to take that which has caused us to create the world, and include it within the world we have created, is clearly impossible. That is why Quality cannot be defined. If we do define it we are defining something less than Quality itself.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Zen is the "spirit of the valley." The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Poincaré wrote, "If a phenomenon admits of a complete mechanical explanation it will admit of an infinity of others which will account equally well for all the peculiarities disclosed by experiment." This was the statement made by Phædrus in the laboratory; it raised the question that failed him out of school.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The solutions all are simple—after you have arrived at them. But they're simple only when you know already what they are.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The real cycle you're working on is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be "out there" and the person that appears to be "in here" are not two separate things. They grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The mythos-over-logos argument points to the fact that each child is born as ignorant as any caveman. What keeps the world from reverting to the Neandertal with each generation is the continuing, ongoing mythos, transformed into logos but still mythos, the huge body of common knowledge that unites our minds as cells are united in the body of man. To feel that one is not so united, that one can accept or discard this mythos as one pleases, is not to understand what the mythos is.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is only one kind of person, Phædrus said, who accepts or rejects the mythos in which he lives. And the definition of that person, when he has rejected the mythos, Phædrus said, is "insane." To go outside the mythos is to become insane.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You have all these fragments, like pieces of a puzzle, and you can place them together into large groups, but the groups don't go together no matter how you try, and then suddenly you get one fragment and it fits two different groups and then suddenly the two great groups are one. The relation of the mythos to insanity. That's a key fragment. I doubt whether anyone ever said that before. Insanity is the terra incognita surrounding the mythos. And he knew! He knew the Quality he talked about lay outside the mythos.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The mythos. The mythos is insane. That's what he believed. The mythos that says the forms of this world are real but the Quality of this world is unreal, that is insane!”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's paradoxical that where people are the most closely crowded, in the big coastal cities in the East and West, the loneliness is the greatest. Back where people were so spread out in western Oregon and Idaho and Montana and the Dakotas you'd think the loneliness would have been greater, but we didn't see it so much. The explanation, I suppose, is that the physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance, and in Montana and Idaho the physical distances are big but the psychic distances between people are small, and here it's reversed.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That's the way it must have been a hundred or two hundred years ago. Hardly any people and hardly any loneliness. I'm undoubtedly over-generalizing, but if the proper qualifications were introduced it would be true.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Quality tends to fan out like waves. The Quality job he didn't think anyone was going to see is seen, and the person who sees it feels a little better because of it, and is likely to pass that feeling on to others, and in that way the Quality tends to keep on going.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Professor of Philosophy seems quite aware of what has happened. His previous little eye-flick of malice toward Phædrus has turned to a little eye-flick of fear. He seems to understand that within the present classroom situation, when the time comes, he can get exactly the same treatment he gave, and there will be no sympathy from any of the faces before him. He's thrown away his right to courtesy. There's no way to prevent retaliation now except to keep covered.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Aristotle has always been eminently attackable and eminently attacked throughout history, and shooting down Aristotle's patent absurdities, like shooting fish in a barrel, didn't afford much satisfaction.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Dialectic generally means "of the nature of the dialogue," which is a conversation between two persons. Nowadays it means logical argumentation. It involves a technique of cross-examination, by which truth is arrived at.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Plato is the essential Buddha-seeker who appears again and again in each generation, moving onward and upward toward the "one." Aristotle is the eternal motorcycle mechanic who prefers the "many.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Socrates is not using dialectic to understand rhetoric, he is using it to destroy it, or at least to bring it into disrepute, and so his questions are not real questions at all—they are just word-traps which Gorgias and his fellow rhetoricians fall into.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When it is known that Plato put his own words in Socrates' mouth (Aristotle says this) there should be no reason to doubt that he could have put his own words into other mouths too.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Many of the older Sophists were selected as "ambassadors" of their cities, certainly no office of disrespect. The name Sophist was even applied without disparagement to Socrates and Plato themselves.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The results of Socrates' martyrdom and Plato's unexcelled prose that followed are nothing less than the whole world of Western man as we know it. If the idea of truth had been allowed to perish unrediscovered by the Renaissance it's unlikely that we would be much beyond the level of prehistoric man today. The ideas of science and technology and other systematically organized efforts of man are dead-centered on it. It is the nucleus of it all.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Man is not the source of all things, as the subjective idealists would say. Nor is he the passive observer of all things, as the objective idealists and materialists would say. The Quality which creates the world emerges as a relationship between man and his experience. He is a participant in the creation of all things. The measure of all things—it fits.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How are you going to teach virtue if you teach the relativity of all ethical ideas? Virtue, if it implies anything at all, implies an ethical absolute. A person whose idea of what is proper varies from day to day can be admired for his broadmindedness, but not for his virtue.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Phædrus is fascinated too by the description of the motive of "duty toward self " which is an almost exact translation of the Sanskrit word dharma, sometimes described as the "one" of the Hindus. Can the dharma of the Hindus and the "virtue" of the ancient Greeks be identical?”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Lightning hits! Quality! Virtue! Dharma! That is what the Sophists were teaching! Not ethical relativism. Not pristine "virtue." But aretê. Excellence. Dharma! Before the Church of Reason. Before substance. Before form. Before mind and matter. Before dialectic itself. Quality had been absolute. Those first teachers of the Western world were teaching Quality, and the medium they had chosen was that of rhetoric.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source