Robert M. Pirsig Quotes: 15

• 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: An Inquiry Into Values

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

  Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

• The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth,"and so it goes away. Puzzling.

  Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

• You are never dedicated to 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 kinds of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.

  Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

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

• For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.

  Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

• 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.

  Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

• …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.

  Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

• 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.

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

• We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with noartistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all,and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly.

  Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

• 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, for the Buddha is everywhere. But just as obviously to ask the question is to look in the right direction, for the Buddha is everwhere.

  Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

• 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.

• The study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself. Working on a motorcycle, working well, caring, is to become part of a process, to achieve an inner peace of mind. The motorcycle is primarily a mental phenomenon.

• To all appearances he was just drifting. In actuality he was just drifting.

  Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values