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Robert M. Pirsig [1928-0] American

Rank: 101
Philosopher, Writer

Robert Maynard Pirsig is an American writer and philosopher, and the author of the philosophical novels Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values and Lila: An Inquiry into Morals.

Alone, Brainy, Experience, Famous, Food, Funny, Future, Great, Independence, Morning, Peace, Truth

Quote	Tags	Rank
Boredom always precedes a period of great creativity.	Great	101
The truth knocks on the door and you say, go away, I'm looking for the truth, and it goes away. Puzzling.	Truth	102
To live for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.	Future	103
When somebody goes outside the cultural norms, the culture has to protect itself.		104
The only Zen you can find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.		105
The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands.	Brainy	106
Even in the presence of others he was completely alone.	Alone	107
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.		108
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.	Peace	109
For me, a writer should be more like a lighthouse keeper, just out there by himself. He shouldn't get his ideas from other people all around him.		110
Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organise themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive?		111
It is a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, 'Go away, I'm looking for the truth,' and so it goes away. Puzzling.		112
If you stare at a wall from four in the morning till nine at night, and you do that for a week, you are getting pretty close to nothingness.	Morning	113
Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food.	Food	114
The funny thing about insane people is that it is kind of the opposite of being a celebrity. Nobody envies you.	Funny	115
We do need a return to individual integrity, self-reliance, and old-fashioned gumption. We really do.	Independence	116
Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.	Experience	117
To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.		118
The solutions all are simple - after you have arrived at them. But they're simple only when you know already what they are.		119
Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20 - 20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go.		120
One geometry cannot be more true than another; it can only be more convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.		121
We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people's lives.		122
The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.		123
What I am is a heretic who's recanted and, thereby, in everyone's eyes, saved his soul. Everyone's eyes but one, who knows deep down inside that all he has saved is his skin.		124
Quality is the Buddha.		125
The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.		126
There's no such thing as morality.		201
I really don't mind dying because I figure I haven't wasted this life.		202
Up until my first book was published, I had all this potential, people would say, and I screwed up. After it, I could say: 'No, I didn't screw up.'		203
I did not want to write one of those sequels that famous first-book authors get into where everybody says, 'Oh yeah.'	Famous	204
If you run from technology, it will chase you.		205
I have money, fame, a happy wife, our daughter Nell.		206
The Buddha resides as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain.		207
It's the dualistic ways of looking at things that produces the evil.		208
People are all at sixes and sevens with each other. They're always quarreling. They never somehow resolve anything.		209

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