"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

"The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there."
— Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values)

"When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called a Religion."
— Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values)

"The only Zen you find on tops of mountains is the Zen you bring there."
— Robert M. Pirsig

"'Is it hard?'
'Not if you have the right attitudes. Its having the right attitudes thats hard.'"
— Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values)

"Like those in the valley behind us, most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships."
— Robert M. Pirsig

"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.
"
— Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values)

"In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty..."
— Robert M. Pirsig

"For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses. "
— Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values)

"Who really can face the future? All you can do is project from the past, even when the past shows that such projections are often wrong. And who really can forget the past? What else is there to know?"
— Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values)

"The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of the mountain, or in the petals of a flower."
— Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values)

""The law of gravity and gravity itself did not exist before Isaac Newton."
"...and what that means is that that law of gravity exists nowhere except in people's heads! It 's a ghost!"
Mind has no matter or energy but they cant escape its predominance over everyhting they do. Logic exist in the mind. numbers exist only in the mind. Idont get upset when scientists say that ghosts exist in the mind. its that only that gets me. science is nly in your mind too, it s just that that dosent make it bad. or ghosts either."
"Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts. Law of logic, of mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts."
"...we see what we see because these ghosts show it to us, ghosts of Moses and Christ and the Buddha, and Plato, and Descartes, and Rousseau and Jefferson and Lincoln, on and on and on. Isac Newton is a very good ghost. One of the best. Your common sence is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these gjosts from the past.""
— Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values)

"If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything."
— Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values)

"Programs of a political nature are important end products of social quality that can be effective only if the underlying structure of social values is right. The social values are right only if the individual values are right. The place to improve the world is first in one's heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there. "
— Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values)

"The pencil is mightier than the pen."
— Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values)

"Mental patterns do not originate out of inorganic nature. They originate out of society, which originates out of inorganic nature. And, as anthropologists know so well, what a mind thinks is as dominated by biological patterns as social patterns are dominated by biological patterns and as biological patterns are dominated by inorganic patterns. There is no direct scientific connection between mind and matter. As the atomic scientist, Niels Bohr, said, "We are suspended in language." Our intellectual description of nature is always culturally derived."
— Robert M. Pirsig

"If your mind is truly, profoundly stuck, then it might be much better off than when it was loaded with ideas"
— Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values)

"And what is good, Phaedrus,
And what is not good—
Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?"
— Robert M. Pirsig

"I argued that physical discomfort is important only when the mood is wrong. Then you fasten on to whatever thing is uncomfortable and call that the cause. But if the mood is right, then physical discomfort doesn't mean much.""
— Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values)

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

""Of course, the laws of science contain no matter and have no energy either and therefore do not exist except in people's minds. It's best to be completely scientific about the whole thing and refuse to believe in either ghosts or the laws of science. That way you're safe. That doesn't leave you very much to believe in, but that's scientific too.""
— Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values)

"Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle. I think that what I have to say has more lasting value."
— Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values)

"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 (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values)

"This condemnation of technology is ingratitude, that's what it is. Blind alley, though. If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything."
— Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values)

"There is a perennial classical question that asks which part of the motorcycle, which grain of sand in which pile, is the Buddha. Obviously to ask that question is to look in the wrong direction, for the Buddha is everywhere. But just as obviously to ask the question is to look in the right direction, for the Buddha is everwhere."
— Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values)

"When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process."
— Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values)

"The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality, not the other way around."
— Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values)

"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 (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values)

"The range of human knowledge today is so great that we're all specialists and the distance between specializations has become so great that anyone who seeks to wander freely between them almost has to forego closeness with the people around him."
— Robert M. Pirsig

"…the doctrinal differences between Hinduism and Buddhism and Taoism are not anywhere near as important as doctrinal differences among Christianity and Islam and Judaism. Holy wars are not fought over them because verbalized statements about reality are never presumed to be reality itself."
— Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values)

"Logic presumes a separation of subject from object; therefore logic is not final wisdom.This is Zen. This is my motorcycle maintenance. "
— Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values)

"Berge sollte man mit möglichst wenig Anstrengung und ohne Ehrgeiz ersteigen. Unsere eigene Natur sollte das Tempo bestimmen. Wenn man unruhig wird, geht man schneller. Wenn man zu keuchen anfängt, geht man langsamer. Man steigt auf den Berg in einem Zustand, in dem sich Rastlosigkeit und Erschöpfung die Waage halten. Dann, wenn man nicht mehr in Gedanken vorauseilt, ist jeder Schritt nicht mehr bloß ein Mittel zum Zweck, sondern ein einmaliges Ereignis. Dieses Blatt ist gezähnt. Dieser Felsen scheint locker. Von dieser Stelle aus ist der Schnee nicht mehr so gut zu sehen, obwohl man ihm schon näher ist. Das sind Dinge, die man ohnehin wahrnehmen sollte. Nur auf irgendein zukünftiges Ziel hin zu leben ist seicht. Die Flanken des Berges sind es, auf denen Leben gedeiht, nicht der Gipfel. Hier wächst etwas."
— Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values)

""I turn my head from side to side."
pg.37"
— Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values)

"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

"The truth knocks on the door an you say, "Go away I am looking for truth," and it goes away, puzzling."
— Robert M. Pirsig

"What keeps the world from reverting to the Neanderthal with each generation is the continuing, ongoing mythos... the huge body of common knowledge that unites our minds as cells are united in the body of man..."
— Robert M. Pirsig

"The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn't any other test. If the machine produces tranquility it's right. If it disturbs you it's wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed."
— Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values)

"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

"The result is rather typical of modern technology, an overall dullness of appearance so depressing that it must be overlaid with a veneer of "style" to make it acceptable. And that, to anyone who is sensitive to romantic Quality, just makes it all the worse. Now it's not just depressingly dull, it's also phony. Put the two together and you get a pretty accurate basic description of modern American technology: stylized cars and stylized outboard motors and stylized typewriters and stylized clothes. Stylized refrigerators filled with stylized food in stylized kitchens in stylized homes. Plastic stylized toys for stylized children, who at Christmas and birthdays are in style with their stylish parents. You have to be awfully stylish yourself not to get sick of it once in a while. It's the style that gets you; technological ugliness syruped over with romantic phoniness in an effort to produce beauty and profit by people who, though stylish, don't know where to start because no one has ever told them there's such a thing as Quality in this world and it's real, not style. Quality isn't something you lay on top of subjects and objects like tinsel on a Christmas tree. Real Quality must be the source of the subjects and objects, the cone from which the tree must start."
— Robert M. Pirsig

"And what is good, Phaedrus,
And what is not good—
Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?"
— Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values)