Robert M. Pirsig Quotations

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

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

It is not good to talk about Zen, because Zen is nothingness... If you talk about it, you are always lying, and if you don't talk about it, no one knows it is there.

Boredom always precedes a period of great creativity.

The study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself. Working on a motorcycle, working well, caring, is to become part of a process, to achieve an inner peace of mind. The motorcycle is primarily a mental phenomenon.

Even in the presence of others he was completely alone.

When somebody goes outside the cultural norms, the culture has to protect itself.

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

The truth knocks on the door and you say, go away, I'm looking for the truth, and it goes away. Puzzling.

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?

For me, a writer should be more like a lighthouse keeper, just out there by himself. He shouldn't get his ideas from other people all around him.

It is a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, 'Go away, I'm looking for the truth,' and so it goes away. Puzzling.

If you stare at a wall from four in the morning till nine at night, and you do that for a week, you are getting pretty close to nothingness.

Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food.

One geometry cannot be more true than another; it can only be more convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.

We do need a return to individual integrity, self-reliance, and old-fashioned gumption. We really do.

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

What I am is a heretic who's recanted and, thereby, in everyone's eyes, saved his soul. Everyone's eyes but one, who knows deep down inside that all he has saved is his skin.

The only Zen you 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.

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.

The solutions all are simple - after you have arrived at them. But they're simple only when you know already what they are.

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

The funny thing about insane people is that it is kind of the opposite of being a celebrity. Nobody envies you.

The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.

I really don't mind dying because I figure I haven't wasted this life.

I did not want to write one of those sequels that famous first-book authors get into where everybody says, 'Oh yeah.'

If you run from technology, it will chase you,

Up until my first book was published, I had all this potential, people would say, and I screwed up. After it, I could say: 'No, I didn't screw up.'

The Buddha resides 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.

I have money, fame, a happy wife, our daughter Nell.

It's the dualistic ways of looking at things that produces the evil.

People are all at sixes and sevens with each other. They're always quarreling. They never somehow resolve anything.

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.

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...

The solutions all are simple -- after you have arrived at them. But they're simple only when you know already what they are.

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're no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn't just a means to an end but a unique event in itself.To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountains which sustain life, not the top.

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

When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called a Religion.

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

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

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

Like those in the valley behind us, most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships.

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.

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.

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

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.

It's normal at this point for the fear-anger syndrome to take over and make you want to hammer on that side plate with a chisel, to pound it off with a sledge if necessary. You think about it, and the more you think about it the more you're inclined to take the whole machine to a high bridge and drop it off. It's just outrageous that a tiny little slot of a screw can defeat you so totally.

It is always good policy to tell the truth unless of course you are an exceptionally good liar. Jerome K. Jerome It is a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, go away, I'm looking for the truth. and so it goes away. Puzzling.

The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn't any other test. If the machine produces tranquility it's right. If it disturbs you it's wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed.

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.

Today we are living in an intellectual and technological paradise and a moral and social nightmare because the intellectual level of evolution, in its struggle to become free of the social level, has ignored the social level's role in keeping the biological level under control.

The purpose of scientific method is to select a single truth from among many hypothetical truths. That, more than anything else, is what science is all about. But historically science has done exactly the opposite. Through multiplication upon multiplication of facts, information, theories and hypotheses, it is science itself that is leading mankind from single absolute truths to multiple indeterminate, relative ones.

Care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing. A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who’s bound to have some characteristic of quality.

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

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.

Anxiety is sort of the opposite of ego. You're so sure you'll do everything wrong you're afraid to do anything at all. It results from over-motivation- leading to errors that lead to an underestimation of one's self. Work out your anxieties on paper and read. This calms the mind.

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.

To speak of certain government and establishment institutions as 'the system' is to speak correctly . . . They are sustained by structural relationships even when they have lost all other meaning and purpose. People arrive at a factory and perform a totally meaningless task from eight to five without question because the structure demands it be that way. There's no villian, 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.

That's all the motorcycle is, a system of concepts worked out in steel.

We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.

An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality.

I think now the trace of egotism may have been the beginning of all his troubles

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. On a cycle the frame is gone. You're completely in contact with it all. You're in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming.

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

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

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.

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.

It's not the 'nice' guy who brings about real social change. 'Nice' guys look nice because they're conforming. It's the 'bad' guys, who only look nice a hundred years later, that are the real Dynamic force in social evolution.

Quality tends to fan out like waves. The Quality job he didn't think anyone was going to see was seen, and the person who feels it is a little bit better because of it, and is likely to pass that feeling onto others, and in that way the Quality tends to keep going.

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.

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

You've got to keep close to your spouse I think, which is a very hard thing to do in America, with everything always pulling you away. I would advise all married people to spend two hours talking to each other. That's my moral for the day.

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 the mountain, or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha - which is to demean oneself.

That which destroys the old mythos becomes the new mythos.

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.

You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.

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.

If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion.

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

Absence of Quality is the essence of squareness.

One thing about pioneers that you don't hear mentioned is that they are invariably, by their nature, mess-makers. They go forging ahead, seeing only their noble, distant goal, and never notice any of the crud and debris they leave behind them.

The TV scientist who mutters sadly, "The experiment is a failure; we have failed to achieve what we had hoped for," is suffering mainly from a bad script writer. An experiment is never a failure solely because it fails to achieve predicted results. An experiment is a failure only when it also fails adequately to test the hypothesis in question, when the data it produces don't prove anything one way or another.

I argued that physical discomfort is important only when the mood is wrong. Then you fasten on to whatever thing is uncomfortable and call that the cause. But if the mood is right, then physical discomfort doesn't mean much.

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.

When you've got a Chautauqua in your head, it's extremely hard not to inflict it on innocent people.

I have been a lifelong Democrat. Like all ideas, though, the Democrat ideas need to be dynamic. It needs to be kept current.

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.

The ultimate test's always your own serenity. If you don't have this when you start and maintain it while you're working you're likely to build your personal problems right into the machine itself.

No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow.

A person filled with gumption doesn’t sit about stewing about things. He’s at the front of the train of his own awareness, watching to see what’s up the track and meeting it when it comes. That’s gumption. If you’re going to repair a motorcycle, an adequate supply of gumption is the first and most important tool. If you haven’t got that you might as well gather up all the other tools and put them away, because they won’t do you any good.

Stuckness shouldn't be avoided. It's the physic predecessor of all real understanding.

The only zen thoughts you can find on a mountain summit are those you brought yourself.

(What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness).Familiarity can blind you too.

Schools teach you to imitate. If you don't imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade. Here, in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A's. Originality on the other hand could get you anything -- from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it.

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.

The way to see what looks good and understand the reasons it looks good, and to be at one with this goodness as the work proceeds, is to cultivate an inner quietness, a peace of mind so that goodness can shine through.

It was the ghost of rationality itself ... This is the ghost of normal everyday assumptions which declares that the ultimate purpose of life, which is to keep alive, is impossible, but that this is the ultimate purpose of life anyway, so that great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose. That is what the ghost says.

When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process.

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