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Robert M. Pirsig

116 quotes

“The rain has lifted enough so that we can see the horizon now, a sharp line demarking the light grey of the sky and the darker grey of the water.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Now he began to see for the first time the unbelievable magnitude of what man, when he gained power to understand and rule the world in terms of dialectic truths, had lost. He had built empires of scientific capability to manipulate the phenomena of nature into enormous manifestations of his own dreams of power and wealth—but for this he had exchanged an empire of understanding of equal magnitude: an understanding of what it is to be a part of the world, and not an enemy of it.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The halo around the heads of Plato and Socrates is now gone. He sees that they consistently are doing exactly that which they accuse the Sophists of doing—using emotionally persuasive language for the ulterior purpose of making the weaker argument, the case for dialectic, appear the stronger. We always condemn most in others, he thought, that which we most fear in ourselves.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Why destroy aretê? And no sooner had he asked the question than the answer came to him. Plato hadn't tried to destroy aretê. He had encapsulated it; made a permanent, fixed Idea out of it; had converted it to a rigid, immobile Immortal Truth. He made aretê the Good, the highest form, the highest Idea of all. It was subordinate only to Truth itself, in a synthesis of all that had gone before.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Good was not a form of reality. It was reality itself, ever changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed, rigid way.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Plato finds it necessary to separate, for example, "horseness" from "horse" and say that horseness is real and fixed and true and unmoving, while the horse is a mere, unimportant, transitory phenomenon. Horseness is pure Idea. The horse that one sees is a collection of changing Appearances, a horse that can flux and move around all it wants to and even die on the spot without disturbing horseness, which is the Immortal Principle and can go on forever in the path of the Gods of old.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In his attempt to unite the Good and the True by making the Good the highest Idea of all, Plato is nevertheless usurping aretês place with dialectically determined truth. Once the Good has been contained as a dialectical idea it is no trouble for another philosopher to come along and show by dialectical methods that aretê, the Good, can be more advantageously demoted to a lower position within a "true" order of things, more compatible with the inner workings of dialectic. Such a philosopher was not long in coming. His name was Aristotle.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Under Aristotle the "Reader," whose knowledge of Trojan aretê seems conspicuously absent, forms and substances dominate all. The Good is a relatively minor branch of knowledge called ethics; reason, logic, knowledge are his primary concerns. Aretê is dead and science, logic and the University as we know it today have been given their founding charter: to find and invent an endless proliferation of forms about the substantive elements of the world and call these forms knowledge, and transmit these forms to future generations. As "the system.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Poor rhetoric, once "learning" itself, now becomes reduced to the teaching of mannerisms and forms, Aristotelian forms, for writing, as if these mattered.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The bones of the Sophists long ago turned to dust and what they said turned to dust with them and the dust was buried under the rubble of declining Athens through its fall and Macedonia through its decline and fall. Through the decline and death of ancient Rome and Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire and the modern states—buried so deep and with such ceremoniousness and such unction and such evil that only a madman centuries later could discover the clues needed to uncover them, and see with horror what had been done.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Plato often names Socrates' foils for characteristics of their personality. A young, overtalkative, innocent and good-natured foil in the Gorgias is named Polus, which is Greek for "colt." Phædrus' personality is different from this. He is unallied to any particular group. He prefers the solitude of the country to the city. He is aggressive to the point of being dangerous. At one point he threatens Socrates with violence. Phædrus, in Greek, means "wolf." In this dialogue he is carried away by Socrates' discourse on love and is tamed.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In this allegory the seeker, trying to reach the One, is drawn by two horses, one white and noble and temperate, and the other surly, stubborn, passionate and black. The one is forever aiding him in his upward journey to the portals of heaven, the other is forever confounding him. The Chairman has not stated it yet, but he is at the point at which he must now announce that the white horse is temperate reason, the black horse is dark passion, emotion. He is at the point at which these must be described, but the false note suddenly becomes a chorus.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All this is just an analogy.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Fantastic, Phædrus thinks, that he should have remembered that. It just demolishes the whole dialectical position. That may just be the whole show right there. Of course it's an analogy. Everything is an analogy. But the dialecticians don't know that.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No one sees it yet, but they will soon enough. The Chairman of the Committee on Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods has just been shot down in his own classroom. Now he is speechless. He can't think of a word to say. The silence which so built his image at the beginning of the class is now destroying it. He doesn't understand from where the shot has come. He has never confronted a living Sophist. Only dead ones.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Once it's stated that "the dialectic comes before anything else," this statement itself becomes a dialectical entity, subject to dialectical question.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Dialectic, which is the parent of logic, came itself from rhetoric. Rhetoric is in turn the child of the myths and poetry of ancient Greece. That is so historically, and that is so by any application of common sense. The poetry and the myths are the response of a prehistoric people to the universe around them made on the basis of Quality. It is Quality, not dialectic, which is the generator of everything we know.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A lifetime of blows tends to make a person unenthusiastic about any unnecessary interchange that might lead to more. Nothing friendly has been said or even hinted at and much hostility has been shown. Phædrus the wolf. It fits.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Quality is better seen up at the timberline than here obscured by smoky windows and oceans of words, and he sees that what he is talking about can never really be accepted here because to see it one has to be free from social authority and this is an institution of social authority. Quality for sheep is what the shepherd says. And if you take a sheep and put it up at the timberline at night when the wind is roaring, that sheep will be panicked half to death and will call and call until the shepherd comes, or comes the wolf.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A single thought begins to grow in his mind, extracted from something he read in the dialogue Phædrus. "And what is written well and what is written badly—need we ask Lysias, or any other poet or orator, who ever wrote or will write either a political or any other work, in metre or out of metre, poet or prose writer, to teach us this?" What is good, Phædrus, and what is not good—need we ask anyone to tell us these things?”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Quality, the aretê he has fought so hard for, has sacrificed for, has never betrayed, but in all that time has never once understood, now makes itself clear to him and his soul is at rest.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am Phædrus, that is who I am, and they are going to destroy me for speaking the Truth.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Trials never end, of course. Unhappiness and misfortune are bound to occur as long as people live, but there is a feeling now, that was not here before, and is not just on the surface of things, but penetrates all the way through: We've won it. It's going to get better now. You can sort of tell these things.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Who really can forget the past? What else is there to know?”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Certainly no one could have predicted what has happened. Back then, after 121 others had turned this book down, one lone editor offered a standard $3,000 advance. He said the book forced him to decide what he was in publishing for, and added that although this was almost certainly the last payment, I shouldn't be discouraged. Money wasn't the point with a book like this.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is a Swedish word, kulturbärer, which can be translated as "culture-bearer" but still doesn't mean much. It's not a concept that has much American use, although it should have.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A culture-bearing book, like a mule, bears the culture on its back. No one should sit down to write one deliberately. Culture-bearing books occur almost accidentally, like a sudden change in the stock market. There are books of high quality that are an part of the culture, but that is not the same. They are a part of it. They aren't carrying it anywhere. They may talk about insanity sympathetically, for example, because that's the standard cultural attitude. But they don't carry any suggestion that insanity might be something other than sickness or degeneracy.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Uncle Tom's Cabin was no literary masterpiece but it was a culture-bearing book. It came at a time when the entire culture was about to reject slavery. People seized upon it as a portrayal of their own new values and it became an overwhelming success. The success of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance seems the result of this culture-bearing phenomenon. The involuntary shock treatment described here is against the law today. It is a violation of human liberty. The culture has changed.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The hippies had in mind something that they wanted, and were calling it "freedom," but in the final analysis "freedom" is a purely negative goal. It just says something is bad. Hippies weren't really offering any alternatives other than colorful short-term ones, and some of these were looking more and more like pure degeneracy. Degeneracy can be fun but it's hard to keep up as a serious lifetime occupation.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nell teaches aspects of parenthood never understood before. If she cries or makes a mess or decides to be contrary (and these are relatively rare), it doesn't bother. There is always Chris's silence to compare it to. What is seen now so much more clearly is that although the names keep changing and the bodies keep changing, the larger pattern that holds us all together goes on and on. In terms of this larger pattern the lines at the end of this book still stand. We have won it. Things are better now. You can sort of tell these things.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The thing to understand is that if you are going to reform society you don't start with cops. And if you are going to reform intellect you don't start with psychiatrists. If you don't like our present social system or intellectual system the best thing you can do with either cops or psychiatrists is stay out of their way. You leave them till last.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Any person of any philosophic persuasion who sits on a hot stove will verify without any intellectual argument whatsoever that he is in an undeniably low-quality situation: that the value of his predicament is negative. This low quality is not just a vague, woolly-headed, crypto-religious, metaphysical abstraction. It is an experience. It is not a judgment about an experience. It is not a description of experience. The value itself is an experience. As such it is completely predictable. It is verifiable by anyone who cares to do so. It is reproducible.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Between the subject and the object lies the value. This Value is more immediate, more directly sensed than any 'self' or any 'object' to which it may be later assigned. It is more real than the stove. Whether the stove is the cause of the low quality or whether possibly something else is the cause is not yet absolutely certain. But that the quality is low is absolutely certain. It is the primary empirical reality from which such things as stoves and heat and oaths and self are later intellectually constructed.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The most moral activity of all is the creation of space for life to move around.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Good is a noun rather than an adjective.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Metaphysics is names about reality. Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty-thousand-page menu and no food.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too often repeated. "What's new?" is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question "What is best?," a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream. There are eras of human history in which the channels of thought have been too deeply cut and no change was possible, and nothing new ever happened, and "best" was a matter of dogma, but that is not the situation now. Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum. Some channel deepening seems called for.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Now I want to begin to fulfill a certain obligation by stating that there was one person, no longer here, who had something to say, and who said it, but whom no one believed or really understood. Forgotten. For reasons that will become apparent I'd prefer that he remain forgotten, but there's no choice other than to reopen his case. I don't know his whole story. No one ever will, except Phædrus himself, and he can no longer speak. But from his writings and from what others have said and from fragments of my own recall it should be possible to piece together some kind of approximation of what he was talking about.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The romantic mode is primarily inspirational, imaginative, creative, intuitive. Feelings rather than facts predominate. "Art" when it is opposed to "Science" is often romantic. It does not proceed by reason or by laws. It proceeds by feeling, intuition and esthetic conscience. In the northern European cultures the romantic mode is usually associated with femininity, but this is certainly not a necessary association. The classic mode, by contrast, proceeds by reason and by laws—which are themselves underlying forms of thought and behavior. In the European cultures it is primarily a masculine mode and the fields of science, law and medicine are unattractive to women largely for this reason. Although motorcycle riding is romantic, motorcycle maintenance is purely classic.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What Phædrus thought and said is significant. But no one was listening at that time and they only thought him eccentric at first, then undesirable, then slightly mad, and then genuinely insane. There seems little doubt that he was insane, but much of his writing at the time indicates that what was driving him insane was this hostile opinion of him. Unusual behavior tends to produce estrangement in others which tends to further the unusual behavior and thus the estrangement in self-stoking cycles until some sort of climax is reached. In Phædrus' case there was a court-ordered police arrest and permanent removal from society.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People arrive at a factory and perform a totally meaningless task from eight to ﬁve without question because the structure demands that it be that way. There’s no villain, no ‘mean guy’ who wants them to live meaningless lives, it’s just that the structure, the system demands it and no one is willing to take on the formidable task of changing the structure just because it is meaningless. But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you are no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn't just a means to an an end but a unique event in itself. This leaf has jagged edges. This rock looks loose. From this place the snow is less visible, even though closer. These are things you should notice anyway. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top. Here's where things grow.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In our highly complex organic state we advanced organisms respond to our environment with an invention of many marvelous analogues. We invent earth and heavens, trees, stones and oceans, gods, music, arts, language, philosophy, engineering, civilization and science. We call these analogues reality. And they are reality. We mesmerize our children in the name of truth into knowing that they are reality. We throw anyone who does not accept these analogues into an insane asylum. But that which causes us to invent the analogues is Quality. Quality is the continuing stimulus which our environment puts upon us to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What he had been talking about all the time as Quality was here the Tao, the great central generating force of all religions, Oriental and Occidental, past and present, all knowledge, everything. Then his mind's eye looked up and caught his own image and realized where he was and what he was seeing and…I don't know what really happened…but the slippage that Phædrus had felt earlier, the internal parting of his mind, suddenly gathered momentum, as do the rocks at the top of a mountain. Before he could stop it, the sudden accumulated mass of awareness began to grow and grow into an avalanche of thought and awareness out of control; with each additional growth of the downward tearing mass loosening hundreds of times its volume, and then that mass uprooting hundreds of times its volume more, and then hundreds of times that; on and on, wider and broader, until there was nothing left to stand. No more anything. It all gave way from under him.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think that if we are going to reform the world, and make it a better place to live in, the way to do it is not with talk about relationships of a political nature, which are inevitably dualistic, full of subjects and objects and their relationship to one another; or with programs full of things for other people to do. I think that kind of approach starts it at the end and presumes the end is the beginning. 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 own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there. Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anxiety, the next gumption trap, is sort of the opposite of ego. You're so sure you'll do everything wrong you're afraid to do anything at all. Often this, rather than "laziness," is the real reason you find it hard to get started. This gumption trap of anxiety, which results from over-motivation, can lead to all kinds of errors of excessive fussiness. You fix things that don't need fixing, and chase after imaginary ailments. You jump to wild conclusions and build all kinds of errors into the machine because of your own nervousness. These errors, when made, tend to confirm your original underestimation of yourself. This leads to more errors, which lead to more underestimation, in a self-stoking cycle. The best way to break this cycle, I think, is to work out your anxieties on paper. Read every book and magazine you can on the subject. Your anxiety makes this easy and the more you read the more you calm down.”
Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source