Lila Quotes

“To define something is to subordinate it to a tangle of intellectual relationships. And when you do that you destroy real understanding.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals

“Insanity as an absence of common characteristics is also demonstrated by the Rorschach ink-blot test for schizophrenia. In this test, randomly formed ink splotches are shown to the patient and he is asked what he sees. If he says, 'I see a pretty lady with a flowering hat,' that is not a sign of schizophrenia. But if he says, 'All I see is an ink-blot,' he is showing signs of schizophrenia. The person who responds with the most elaborate lie gets the highest score for sanity. The person who tells the absolute truth does not. Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals

“He wasn't going to send her to any hospital. He knew that now. At a hospital they'd just start shooting her full of drugs and tell her to adjust. What they wouldn't see is that she is adjusting. That's what the insanity is. She's adjusting to something. The insanity is the adjustment. Insanity isn't necessarily a step in the wrong direction, it can be an intermediate step in a right direction. It wasn't necessarily a disease. It could be part of a cure.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals

“But if Quality or excellence is seen as the ultimate reality then it becomes possible for more than one set of truths to exist, Then one doesn’t seek the absolute “Truth.” One seeks instead the highest quality intellectual explanation of things with the knowledge that if the past is any guide to the future this explanation must be taken provisionally; as useful until something better comes along. One can then examine intellectual realities the same way he examines paintings in an art gallery, not with an effort to find out which one is the “real” painting, but simply to enjoy and keep those that are of value. There are many sets of intellectual reality in existence and we can perceive some to have more quality than others, but that we do so is, in part, the result of our history and current patterns of values.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals

“When she first came here she used to think there was somebody up in those big buildings who knows what's going on here. They would never come down and talk to her. After a while she found out nobody knows what's going on.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals

“From that original perception of the Indians as the originators of the American style of speech had come an expansion: The Indians were the originators of the American style of life. The American personality is a mixture of European and Indian values. When you see this you begin to see a lot of things that have never been explained before.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals

“It's the clothes that make them think you're not really there.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals

“But the ones who go posing as moralists are the worst. Cost-free morals. Full of great ways for others to improve without any expense to themselves. There's an ego thing in there, too. They use the morals to make someone else look inferior and that way look better themselves. It doesn't matter what the moral code is -- religious morals, political morals, racist morals, capitalist morals, feminist morals, hippie morals -- they're all the same. The moral codes change but the meanness and the egotism stay the same.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals

“It’s all taking the customer’s money and giving him exactly what he wants and then leaving him poorer than when he started.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals

“The idea that “all men are created equal” is a gift to the world from the American Indian.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals

“Insanity on the other hand is an intellectual pattern. It may have biological causes but it has no physical or biological reality. No scientific instrument can be produced in court to show who is insane and who is sane. There's nothing about insanity that conforms to any scientific law of the universe. The scientific laws of the universe are invented by sanity. There's no way by which sanity, using the instruments of its own creation, can measure that which is outside of itself and its creations. Insanity isn't an 'object' of observation. It's an alteration of observation itself. There's no such thing as a 'disease' of patterns of intellect. There's only heresy. And that's what insanity really is.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals

“They were living in some kind of movie projected by this intellectual, electromechanical machine that had been created for their happiness, saying: PARADISE PARADISE PARADISE but which had inadvertently shut them out from direct experience of life itself—and from each other.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals

“These were the underdogs, the outsiders, the pariahs, the sinners of his system. But the reason he was so concerned about them was that he felt the quality and strength of his entire system of organization depended on how he treated them. If he treated the pariahs well he would have a good system. If he treated them badly he would have a weak one.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals

“...that when the Platypus was discovered, scientists said it was a paradox. But Pirsig’s point was it was never a paradox or an oddity. It didn’t make sense only to the scientists because they viewed the nature of animals according to their own classification, when nature did not have any.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals

“Real science and real philosophy are not guided by preconceptions of what subjects are important to consider. That”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals

“The man who suffers a heart attack and is taken off the train at New Rochelle has had all his static patterns shattered, he can’t find them, and in that moment only Dynamic Quality is available to him. That is why he gazes at his own hand with a sense of wonder and delight.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals

“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 Pirsig, Lila: An Enquiry into Morals

“Perché, ad esempio, un gruppo di composti semplici e stabili di carbonio, idrogeno, ossigeno e azoto avrebbero dovuto lottare per miliardi di anni allo scopo di organizzarsi, mettiamo, in un professore di chimica? Che cosa li ha spinti? Se questo professore noi lo lasciamo esposto su uno scoglio al sole per un tempo sufficientemente lungo, le forze della natura lo ridurranno a una serie di composti di carbonio, ossigeno, idrogeno e azoto, più un po' di calcio e di fosforo con tracce di altri minerali. E la reazione è irreversibile.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals

“Good is a noun. That was it.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals

“If you eliminate suffering from this world you eliminate life. There’s no evolution. Those species that don’t suffer don’t survive.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals

“As long as you’re stuck with the old conventions, insanity is going to be a “misunderstanding of the object by the subject.” The object is real, the subject is mistaken. The only problem is how to change the subject’s mind back to a correct comprehension of objective reality.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals

“The most sinister thing about the fall of the Roman Empire was that the people who conquered it never understood that they had done so. They paralyzed the patterns of Roman social structure to a point where everybody just forgot what that structure was. Taxes became uncollectible. Armies composed of hired barbarians stopped receiving pay. Everything just lapsed. The patterns of civilization were forgotten, and a Dark Age settled in.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals

“Radical idealists and degenerate hooligans sometimes strongly resemble each other.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals

“No minority has a right to block a majority from conducting the legal business of the organization. No majority has a right to prevent a minority from peacefully attempting to become a majority.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals

“Whenever you kill a human being you are killing a source of thought too. A human being is a collection of ideas, and these ideas take moral precedence over a society.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals

“Sometimes the insane and the contrarians and the ones who are the closest to suicide are the most valuable people society has. They may be precursors of social change. They've taken the burdens of the culture onto themselves, and in their struggle to solve their own problems they're solving problems for the culture as well.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals

“Pictures aren't intellectual media. Pictures are pictures. The movie business belonged to the celebrity people and they wouldn't begin to know how to portray an intellectual book like his....

But what he saw at this point was a social pattern of values, a film, devouring an intellectual pattern of values, his book. It would be a lower form of life feeding upon a higher form of life. As such it would be immoral.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals

“If "man" invented societies and cities, why are all societies and cities so repressive of "man"?...

...Sometimes people think there are some evil individual "men" somewhere who are exploiting them....These "men" are supposed to be enemies of "man". It gets confusing, but nobody seems to notice the confusion....

... When societies and cultures and cities are seen not as inventions of "man" but as higher organisms than biological man, the phenomena of war and genocide and all the other forms of human exploitation become more intelligible. "Mankind" has never been interested in getting itself killed. But the superorganism, the Giant, who is a pattern of values superimposed on top of biological human bodies, doesn't mind losing a few bodies to protect his greater interests....

...So here was this Giant, this nameless, faceless system reaching for him, ready to devour him and digest him. It would use his energy to grow stronger and stronger throughout his life while he grew older and weaker until, when he was no longer of much use, it would excrete him and find another younger person full of energy to take his place and do the same thing all over again.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals

“...the incredible contrasts of the best and worst...both exist here in such terrific intensity because New York’s never been committed to any preservation of its static patterns. It’s always ready to change. Whether you are or not. That is what creates its horror and that is what creates its power. Its strength is its looseness. It’s the freedom to be so awful that gives it the freedom to be so good. And so things keep happening here all the time that have this Dynamic sparkle that saves it all. In the midst of everything that’s wrong, it sparkles.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals

“the struggle of the noble, free-thinking”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals