Robert M. Pirsig

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.'

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

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.

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

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

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?

There's no such thing as morality.