537 Quotes by Robert M. Pirsig

Schools teach you to imitate. If you don’t imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade.

Dad?” “What?” A small bird rises from a tree in front of us. “What should I be when I grow up?” The bird disappears over a far ridge. I don’t know what to say. “Honest,” I finally say.

The branches and leaves move with each light breeze as if it were expected, were what had been waited for all this time.

Now there was an alternative explanation: people disagreed about Quality because some just used their immediate emotions whereas others applied their overall knowledge.

I make some jokes about it, but they’re not funny and just add to the depression.

That’s all the motorcycle is, a system of concepts worked out in steel.

You can’t really think hard about what you’re doing and listen to the radio at the same time.

To define something is to subordinate it to a tangle of intellectual relationships. And when you do that you destroy real understanding.

Overall goals must be scaled down in importance and immediate goals must be scaled up.