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" 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. "

Robert M. Pirsig

Know

You

Think

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" If you run from technology, it will chase you. "

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

Robert M. Pirsig

You

Bring

" I really don't mind dying because I figure I haven't wasted this life. "

" 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? "

" One geometry cannot be more true than another; it can only be more convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous. "

" The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands. "

" 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.' "

" 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. "

Robert M. Pirsig

Cycle

Top

" 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. "

" Boredom always precedes a period of great creativity. "

" We do need a return to individual integrity, self-reliance, and old-fashioned gumption. We really do. "

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

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

" 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. "

Robert M. Pirsig

Door

Looking

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

Robert M. Pirsig

People

" Even in the presence of others he was completely alone. "

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

" When somebody goes outside the cultural norms, the culture has to protect itself. "

" People are all at sixes and sevens with each other. They're always quarreling. They never somehow resolve anything. "

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

Robert M. Pirsig

Say

Door

" Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food. "

" The funny thing about insane people is that it is kind of the opposite of being a celebrity. Nobody envies you. "

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

" There's no such thing as morality. "

Robert M. Pirsig

Morality

Thing

" I have money, fame, a happy wife, our daughter Nell. "

" 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. "

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

" I did not want to write one of those sequels that famous first-book authors get into where everybody says, 'Oh yeah.' "