Top 15 Robert M. Pirsig Quotes

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

The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.

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

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.

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.

We’re in such a hurry most of the time we never get much chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it’s all gone.

Sometimes it's a little better to travel than to arrive

Is it hard?'
Not if you have the right attitudes. Its having the right attitudes thats hard.

In a car you're always in a compartment, and because you're used to it you don't realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You're a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame.

On a cycle the frame is gone. You're completely in contact with it all. You're in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming.

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

Peace of mind produces right values, right values produce right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity at the center of it all.

But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.

If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything.

For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.

The only Zen you find on tops of mountains is the Zen you bring there.