Robert M. Pirsig

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

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

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

When a shepherd goes to kill a wolf, and takes his dog to see the sport, he should take care to avoid mistakes. The dog has certain relationships to the wolf the shepherd may have forgotten.

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

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.

What the Metaphysics of Quality would do is take this separate category, Quality, and show how it contains within itself both subjects and objects. The Metaphysics of Quality would show how things become enormously more coherent-fabulously more coherent-when you start with an assumption that Quality is the primary empirical reality of the world. . . . . . . but showing that, of course, was a very big job. . . .

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.

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.

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

We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people's lives.

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

Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not.

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... The explanation, I suppose, is that the physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance...

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

The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality. The tree that you are aware of intellectually, because of that small time lag, is always in the past and therefore is always unreal. Any intellectually conceived object is always in the past and therefore unreal. Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place. There is no other reality.

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.

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.

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

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

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