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Robert M. Pirsig Quotes

1928–2017 United States

Robert Maynard Pirsig (6 September 1928 – 24 April 2017) was an American philosopher and novelist, most famous for his novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in which he proposed what has become known as his Metaphysics of Quality (MoQ).

United States
Novelists
Philosophers

Also known as: Pirsig, Robert M.

Random Robert M. Pirsig quote

105 quotes

You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)

The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality, not the other way around.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)

Steel can be any shape you want if you are skilled enough, and any shape but the one you want if you are not.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)

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

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)

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

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)

What is good, Phædrus, and what is not good—need we ask anyone to tell us these things?

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)

The world of underlying form is an unusual object of discussion because it is actually a mode of discussion itself.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)

The number of rational hypotheses that can explain any given phenomenon is infinite.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)

Any philosophic explanation of Quality is going to be both false and true precisely because it is a philosophic explanation.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)

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.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)

Religion isn't invented by man. Men are invented by religion.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)

My personal feeling is that this is how any further improvement of the world will be done: by individuals making Quality decisions and that's all.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)

Once it's stated that "the dialectic comes before anything else," this statement itself becomes a dialectical entity, subject to dialectical question.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)

Some channel deepening seems called for.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)

Technology presumes there's just one right way to do things and there never is.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)

I've noticed that people who have never worked with steel have trouble seeing this—that the motorcycle is primarily a mental phenomenon.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)

It is Quality, not dialectic, which is the generator of everything we know.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)

It's paradoxical that where people are the most closely crowded, in the big coastal cities in the East and West, the loneliness is the greatest.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)

I think metaphysics is good if it improves everyday life; otherwise forget it.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)

"You've got to cross that lonesome valley." It carries him forward. "You've got to cross it by yourself."

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Robert M. Pirsig (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.