110+ Robert M. Pirsig Quotes On Quality, Quality Of And Quality Improvement

Robert M. Pirsig was an American philosopher, author, and teacher. He was best known for his 1974 book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, an autobiographical work that combines philosophical musings with a story of a motorcycle journey. His 1979 follow-up, Lila, extended his exploration of the relationship between quality and morality. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Robert M. Pirsig on life, leadership, quality.

Top 10 Robert M. Pirsig Quotes

1. The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands.
2. The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality.
3. 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.
4. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.
5. The only Zen you can find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.
6. The truth knocks on the door and you say, go away, I'm looking for the truth, and it goes away. Puzzling.
7. The truth knocks on the door and you say, go away, I'm looking for the truth, and it goes away. Puzzling.
8. 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.
9. My favorite piece of technical writing: Assembly of Japanese bicycle require great peace of mind.
10. Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster.

Robert M. Pirsig Short Quotes

• If you have a high evaluation of yourself then your ability to recognize new facts is weakened.
• Sometimes it's a little better to travel than to arrive
• New York has always been going to hell but somehow it never gets there.
• That's all the motorcycle is, a system of concepts worked out in steel.
• Although motorcycle riding is romantic, motorcycle maintenance is purely classic.
• We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people's lives.
• From an endless beach of reality, we take a grain of sand and call it the world.
• The number of hypotheses available to explain any given phenomenon is infinite.
• For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.
• Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food.

Robert M. Pirsig Quotes About Life

The Buddha takes no position on gods, he suggests they may exist or they may not, but either way you can live a moral life. — Robert M. Pirsig

I think metaphysics is good if it improves everyday life; otherwise forget it. — Robert M. Pirsig

99 per cent of your life recognises things without definition, a baby recognises its mother's face without having it defined. It's just an arbitrary rule this rule of definition that Socrates set down. — Robert M. Pirsig

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. — Robert M. Pirsig

I really don't mind dying because I figure I haven't wasted this life. 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. — Robert M. Pirsig

Cultures are not the source of all morals, only a limited set of morals. Cultures can be graded and judged morally according to their contribution to the evolution of life. — Robert M. Pirsig

I go on living, more from force of habit than anything else. — Robert M. Pirsig

The most moral activity of all is the creation of space for life to move around. — Robert M. Pirsig

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

I really don't mind dying because I figure I haven't wasted this life. — Robert M. Pirsig

Robert M. Pirsig Quotes About Quality

Art is anything you can do well. Anything you can do with quality. — Robert M. Pirsig

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. — Robert M. Pirsig

Quality tends to fan out like waves. — Robert M. Pirsig

Absence of Quality is the essence of squareness. — Robert M. Pirsig

Quality... you know what it is, yet you don't know what it is. — Robert M. Pirsig

An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality. — Robert M. Pirsig

Now, to take that which has caused us to create the world, and include it within the world we have created, is clearly impossible. This is why Quality cannot be defined. If we do define it, we are defining something less than Quality itself. — Robert M. Pirsig

Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions. — Robert M. Pirsig

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

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. — Robert M. Pirsig

Robert M. Pirsig Quotes About Truth

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

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

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. — Robert M. Pirsig

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. — Robert M. Pirsig

Institutions such as schools, churches, governments and political organizations of every sort all tended to direct thought for ends other than truth, for the perpetuation of their own functions, and for the control of individuals in the service of these functions. — Robert M. Pirsig

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

Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not. — Robert M. Pirsig

It's better to live with a sad truth than with all the happy progress talk you get up here in the North. — Robert M. Pirsig

Socrates is not just expounding noble ideas in a vacuum. He is in the middle of a war between those who think truth is absolute and those who think truth is relative. He is fighting that war with everything he has. — Robert M. Pirsig

Robert M. Pirsig Famous Quotes And Sayings

A person isn't considered insane if there are a number of people who believe the same way. Insanity isn't supposed to be a communicable disease. If one other person starts to believe him, or maybe two or three, then it's a religion. — Robert M. Pirsig

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. — Robert M. Pirsig

What keeps the world from reverting to the Neanderthal with each generation is the continuing, ongoing mythos... the huge body of common knowledge that unites our minds as cells are united in the body of man. — Robert M. Pirsig

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. — Robert M. Pirsig

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. — Robert M. Pirsig

You are never dedicated to do 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 kind of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt. — Robert M. Pirsig

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. — Robert M. Pirsig

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. — Robert M. Pirsig

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

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. — Robert M. Pirsig

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? — Robert M. Pirsig

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

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

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

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. — Robert M. Pirsig

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

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. — Robert M. Pirsig

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. — Robert M. Pirsig

Civilization, or "the system" or "society" or whatever you want to call it, is best served not by mules but by free men. — Robert M. Pirsig

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

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

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. — Robert M. Pirsig

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. — Robert M. Pirsig

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

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. — Robert M. Pirsig

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

I really am a recluse. I just enjoy watching the wind blow through the trees. In America someone who sits around and does that is at the bottom of the ladder, but in Japan, say, someone who goes up into the mountains is accorded great respect. I guess I am somewhere in between. I enjoy reclusion: it clears my mind. — Robert M. Pirsig

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

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. — Robert M. Pirsig

The Church of Reason, like all institutions of the System, is based not on individual strength but upon individual weakness. What's really demanded in the Church of Reason is not ability, but inability. Then you are considered teachable. A truly able person is always a threat. — Robert M. Pirsig

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

Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place. There is no other reality. — Robert M. Pirsig

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. — Robert M. Pirsig

If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything. — Robert M. Pirsig

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. — Robert M. Pirsig

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. — Robert M. Pirsig

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

The real University... has no specific location. It owns no property, pays no salaries, and receives no material dues... The real University is a state of mind. It is that great heritage of rational thought that has been brought down to us through the centuries. — Robert M. Pirsig

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. — Robert M. Pirsig

The range of human knowledge today is so great that we're all specialists and the distance between specializations has become so great that anyone who seeks to wander freely between them almost has to forego closeness with the people around him. — Robert M. Pirsig

The pencil is mightier than the pen. — Robert M. Pirsig

... the laws of physics and of logic ... the number system ... the principle of algebraic substitution. These are ghosts. We just believe in them so thoroughly they seem real. — Robert M. Pirsig

The real cycle you're working on is a cycle called yourself. — Robert M. Pirsig

Cliches and stereotypes such as "beatnik" or "hippie" have been invented for the antitechnologists, the antisystem people, and will continue to be. But one does not convert individuals into mass people with the simple coining of a mass term. — Robert M. Pirsig

Mental reflection is so much more interesting than TV it's a shame more people don't switch over to it. — Robert M. Pirsig

The best students always are flunking. Every good teacher knows that. — Robert M. Pirsig

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. — Robert M. Pirsig

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

There's so much talk about the system. And so little understanding. — Robert M. Pirsig

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. — Robert M. Pirsig

Talk about rationality can get very confusing unless the things with which rationality deals are also included. — Robert M. Pirsig

Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted. — Robert M. Pirsig

The past cannot remember the past. The future can't generate the future. The cutting edge of the instant right here and now is always nothing less than the totality of everything there is. — Robert M. Pirsig

The real ugliness lies in the relationship between people who produce the technology and the things they produce, which results in a similar relationship between the people who use the technology and the things they use. — Robert M. Pirsig

In the temple of science are many mansions ... and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them thither. — Robert M. Pirsig

Who really can face the future? All you can do is project from the past, even when the past shows that such projections are often wrong. And who really can forget the past? What else is there to know? — Robert M. Pirsig

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

The more you read, the more you calm down. — Robert M. Pirsig

What's wrong with technology is that it's not connected in any real way with matters of the spirit and of the heart. And so it does blind, ugly things quite by accident and gets hated for that. — Robert M. Pirsig

…the doctrinal differences between Hinduism and Buddhism and Taoism are not anywhere near as important as doctrinal differences among Christianity and Islam and Judaism. Holy wars are not fought over them because verbalized statements about reality are never presumed to be reality itself. — Robert M. Pirsig

The idea that the majority of students attend a university for an education independent of the degree and grades is a hypocrisy everyone is happier not to expose. Occasionally some students do arrive for an education but rote and mechanical nature of the institution soon converts them to a less idealic attitude — Robert M. Pirsig

Data without generalization is just gossip. — Robert M. Pirsig

If your mind is truly, profoundly stuck, then it might be much better off than when it was loaded with ideas — Robert M. Pirsig

And what is good, Phaedrus, And what is not good— Need we ask anyone to tell us these things? — Robert M. Pirsig

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

The more you look, the more you see. — Robert M. Pirsig

A person who follows the dharma is unpredictable because the dharma is unpredictable. — Robert M. Pirsig

It's better not to see than to see wrongly. — Robert M. Pirsig

Religious mysticism is intellectual garbage. It’s a vestige of the old superstitious Dark Ages when nobody knew anything...It is one of those delusions that isn’t called insane only because there are so many people involved. — Robert M. Pirsig

The buddah can reside in the gears of a motorcycle as easily as in a flower on a mountaintop. To believe otherwise is to demean the buddah; which is to demean one's self. — Robert M. Pirsig

Logic presumes a separation of subject from object; therefore logic is not final wisdom.This is Zen. This is my motorcycle maintenance. — Robert M. Pirsig

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 — Robert M. Pirsig

Between the subject and the object lies the value. — Robert M. Pirsig

We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with the emphasis on "good" rather than on "time". — Robert M. Pirsig

Life Lessons by Robert M. Pirsig

1. Robert M. Pirsig's philosophy emphasizes the importance of understanding and accepting the world as it is, rather than trying to force it to conform to our expectations.
2. He encourages us to strive for balance and harmony between mind and body, and to recognize that our understanding of the world is always evolving and incomplete.
3. Pirsig also encourages us to be mindful of our actions and to strive for personal growth and self-improvement.