Robert M. Pirsig Quotes, Thoughts and Image

The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality.

every answer one finds leads to ten more questions. The more we learn the less we know.

The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands.

To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.

Boredom always precedes a period of great creativity.

Is it hard?' Not if you have the right attitudes. Its having the right attitudes thats hard.

Sometimes it's a little better to travel than to arrive

When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things.

Art is anything you can do well. Anything you can do with quality.

The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you actually don’t know.

In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty.

The only Zen you can find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.

We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people's lives.

When you live in the shadow of insanity, the appearance of another mind that thinks and talks as yours does is something close to a blessed event.

One of the most moral acts is to create a space in which life can move forward.

Making an art out of your technological life is the way to solve the problem of technology...Art is anything that you can do well. Anything that you can do with Quality.

Even though quality cannot be defined, you know what quality is.

The best students always are flunking. Every good teacher knows that.

My favorite piece of technical writing: Assembly of Japanese bicycle require great peace of mind.

Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.

Peace of mind produces right values, right values produce right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity at the center of it all.

We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all, and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly.

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.

Absence of Quality is the essence of squareness.

Communism and socialism, programs for intellectual control over society ... fascism, a program for the social control of intellect.

That which destroys the old mythos becomes the new mythos.

If you have a high evaluation of yourself then your ability to recognize new facts is weakened.

Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster.

What we think of as reality is a continuous synthesis of elements from a fixed hierarchy of a priori concepts and the ever changing data of the senses.

It's better not to see than to see wrongly.

It's so hard when contemplated in advance, and so easy when you do it.

Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle. I think that what I have to say has more lasting value.

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.