Robert M. Pirsig

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

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

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.

If you run from technology, it will chase you.

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.

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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

There's no such thing as morality.

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

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

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.

Quality is the Buddha.

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

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

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

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

Even in the presence of others he was completely alone.

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

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

The solutions all are simple - after you have arrived at them. But they're simple only when you know already what they are.

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.'

Boredom always precedes a period of great creativity.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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