Quotes by Robert M. Pirsig

“To live only 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 so it goes away. Puzzling.”

“Hed no longer be a grade-motivated person. Hed be a knowledge-motivated person. He would need no external pushing to learn. His push would come from inside. Hed be a free man. He wouldnt need a lot...”

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

“What is in mind is a sort of Chautauqua...that's the only name I can think of for it...like the traveling tent-show Chautauquas that used to move across America, this America, the one that we are n...”

“There is a perennial classical question that asks which part of the motorcycle, which grain of sand in which pile, is the Buddha. Obviously to ask that question is to look in the wrong direction, f...”

“If I hold my head to the left and look down at the handle grips and front wheel and map carrier and gas tank I get one pattern of sense data. If I move my head to the right I get another slightly d...”

“The cause of our current social crises, he would have said, is a genetic defect within the nature of reason itself. And until this genetic defect is cleared, the crises will continue. Our current m...”

“To all appearances he was just drifting. In actuality he was just drifting.”

“The primitive tribes permitted far less individual freedom than does modern society. Ancient wars were committed with far less moral justification than modern ones. A technology that produces debri...”

“You cant really think hard about what youre doing and listen to the radio at the same time. Maybe they didnt see their job as having anything to do with hard thought, just wrench twiddling.”

“He felt that 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 ...”

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

“I dont know whyits just thatI dont knowtheyre not kin."Surprising word, I think to myself never used it before. Not of kinsounds like hillbilly talknot of a kindsame rootkindness, toothey cant have...”

“But the ones who go posing as moralists are the worst. Cost-free morals. Full of great ways for others to improve without any expense to themselves. There's an ego thing in there, too. They use the...”

“The application of this knife, the division of the world into parts and the building of this structure, is something everybody does. All the time we are aware of millions of things around us - thes...”

“An alternative and better definition of reality can be found by naming some of its components: air, sunlight, wind, water, the motion of waves, the patterns of clouds before a coming storm. These...”

“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 ove...”

“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 ...”

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