The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there. Robert M. Pirsig More Quotes by Robert M. Pirsig More Quotes From Robert M. Pirsig The Church of Reason, like all institutions of the System, is based not on individual strength but upon individual weakness. What's really demanded in the Church of Reason is not ability, but inability. Then you are considered teachable. A truly able person is always a threat. Robert M. Pirsig individual-strengthweaknesschurch Cliches and stereotypes such as "beatnik" or "hippie" have been invented for the antitechnologists, the antisystem people, and will continue to be. But one does not convert individuals into mass people with the simple coining of a mass term. Robert M. Pirsig simplehippiepeople Now he began to see for the first time the unbelievable magnitude of what man, when he gained power to understand and rule the world in terms of dialectic truths, had lost. He had built empires of scientific capability to manipulate the phenomena of nature into enormous manifestations of his own dreams of power and wealth...but for this he had exchanged an empire of understanding of equal magnitude: an understanding of what it is to be a part of the world, and not an enemy of it. Robert M. Pirsig understandingdreammen What's wrong with technology is that it's not connected in any real way with matters of the spirit and of the heart. And so it does blind, ugly things quite by accident and gets hated for that. Robert M. Pirsig technologyrealheart The number of hypotheses available to explain any given phenomenon is infinite. Robert M. Pirsig giveninfinitenumbers Communism and socialism, programs for intellectual control over society ... fascism, a program for the social control of intellect. Robert M. Pirsig socialismcommunismintellectual I really am a recluse. I just enjoy watching the wind blow through the trees. In America someone who sits around and does that is at the bottom of the ladder, but in Japan, say, someone who goes up into the mountains is accorded great respect. I guess I am somewhere in between. I enjoy reclusion: it clears my mind. Robert M. Pirsig blowwindamerica 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. Robert M. Pirsig religiousdarkpeople Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place. There is no other reality. Robert M. Pirsig visionmomentsreality The funny thing about insane people is that it is kind of the opposite of being a celebrity. Nobody envies you. Robert M. Pirsig funny-thingsenvyopposites The TV scientist who mutters sadly, "The experiment is a failure; we have failed to achieve what we had hoped for," is suffering mainly from a bad script writer. An experiment is never a failure solely because it fails to achieve predicted results. An experiment is a failure only when it also fails adequately to test the hypothesis in question, when the data it produces don't prove anything one way or another. Robert M. Pirsig datatestssuffering Data without generalization is just gossip. Robert M. Pirsig generalizationgossipdata An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality. Robert M. Pirsig understandingkeysacceptance In the temple of science are many mansions ... and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them thither. Robert M. Pirsig variousmotivetemples One thing about pioneers that you don't hear mentioned is that they are invariably, by their nature, mess-makers. They go forging ahead, seeing only their noble, distant goal, and never notice any of the crud and debris they leave behind them. Robert M. Pirsig pioneersnoblegoal The world comes to us in an endless stream of puzzle pieces that we would like to think all fit together somehow, but that in fact never do. Robert M. Pirsig togetherworldthinking The hippies had in mind something that they wanted, and were calling it freedom, but in the final analysis freedom is a purely negative goal. It just says something is bad. Hippies weren't really offering any alternatives other than colorful short-term ones, and some of these were looking more and more like pure degeneracy. Degeneracy can be fun but it's hard to keep up as a serious lifetime occupation. Robert M. Pirsig offeringhippiefun Schools teach you to imitate. If you don't imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade. Here, in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A's. Originality on the other hand could get you anything -- from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it. Robert M. Pirsig educationteacherschool The sun of quality does not revolve around the subjects and objects of our existence. It does not just passively illuminate them. It is not subordinate to them in any way. It has CREATED them. They are subordinate to IT. Robert M. Pirsig qualitydoeway The only difference between causation and the value is that the word "cause" implies absolute certainty whereas the implied meaning of "value" is one of preference. In classical science it was supposed that the world always works in terms of absolute certainty and that "cause" is the more appropriate word to describe it. But in modern quantum physics all that is changed. Particles "prefer" to do what they do. An individual particle is not absolutely committed to one predictable behavior. What appears to be an absolute cause is just a very consistent pattern of preferences. Robert M. Pirsig patternsdifferencesworld
