Robert M. Pirsig
Robert M. Pirsig
Robert Maynard Pirsigis an American writer and philosopher, and the author of the philosophical novels Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Valuesand Lila: An Inquiry into Morals...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth6 September 1928
CountryUnited States of America
men civilization want
Civilization, or "the system" or "society" or whatever you want to call it, is best served not by mules but by free men.
art men art-is
Art is the Godhead as revealed in the works of man.
war fighting thinking
Socrates is not just expounding noble ideas in a vacuum. He is in the middle of a war between those who think truth is absolute and those who think truth is relative. He is fighting that war with everything he has.
want asks
"When are we going to get going?" Chris says. "What's your hurry?" I ask. "I just want to get going." "There's nothing up ahead that's any better than it is right here."
lonely attitude real
The real evil isn't the objects of technology but the tendency of technology to isolate people into lonely attitudes of objectivity. It's the objectivity, the dualistic way of looking at things underlying technology, that produces the evil.
quality fans wave
Quality tends to fan out like waves.
religious intellectual quality
Any person of any philosophic persuasion who sits on a hot stove will verify without any intellectual argument whatsoever that he is in an undeniably low-quality situation: that the value of his predicament is negative. This low quality is not just a vague, woolly-headed, crypto-religious, metaphysical abstraction. It is an experience. It is not a judgment about an experience. It is not a description of experience. The value itself is an experience. As such it is completely predictable. It is verifiable by anyone who cares to do so.
creativity boredom periods
Boredom always precedes a period of great creativity.
understanding littles zen-motorcycle-maintenance
There's so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.
running thinking sight
Unless you're fond of hollering you don't make great conversations on a running cycle. Instead you spend your time being aware of things and meditating on them. On sights and sounds, on the mood of the weather and things remembered, on the machine and the countryside you're in, thinking about things at great leisure and length without being hurried and without feeling you're losing time.
teacher students very-good
The best students always are flunking. Every good teacher knows that.
men cells mind
What keeps the world from reverting to the Neanderthal with each generation is the continuing, ongoing mythos... the huge body of common knowledge that unites our minds as cells are united in the body of man...
war body principles
An evolutionary morality argues that The North was right in pursuing that war because a nation is a higher form of evolution than a human body and the principle of human equality is an even higher form than a nation
religious dark people
Religious mysticism is intellectual garbage. It’s a vestige of the old superstitious Dark Ages when nobody knew anything...It is one of those delusions that isn’t called insane only because there are so many people involved.