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 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. And if you project forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)

Man is not the source of all things, as the subjective idealists would say. Nor is he the passive observer of all things, as the objective idealists and materialists would say. The Quality which creates the world emerges as a relationship between man and his experience. He is a participant in the creation of all things. The measure of all things—it fits.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)

I think present-day reason is an analogue of the flat earth of the medieval period. If you go too far beyond it you're presumed to fall off, into insanity. And people are very much afraid of that. I think this fear of insanity is comparable to the fear people once had of falling off the edge of the world. Or the fear of heretics. There's a very close analogue there.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)

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.

Disputed

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

Disputed

Attribution

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