537 Quotes by Robert M. Pirsig

One thing about pioneers that you don’t hear mentioned is that they are invariably, by their nature, mess-makers.

But it’s better to know a lot and say little, I think, than know a little and say a lot.

Mental reflection is so much more interesting than TV it’s a shame more people don’t switch over to it.

You, sir, what are the three kinds of particular rhetoric according to subject matter discussed?” But Phaedrus is prepared. “Forensic, deliberative and epideictic,” he answers calmly. “What are the epideictic techniques?” “The technique of identifying likenesses, the technique of praise, that of encomium and that of amplification.

Miles later and the heat is just ferocious. Sunglasses and goggles are not enough for this glare. You need a welder’s mask.

This is the hardest stuff in the world to photograph. You need a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree lens, or something. You see it, and then you look down in the ground glass and it’s just nothing. As soon as you put a border on it, it’s gone.

It’s been necessary since before the time of Socrates to reject the passions, the emotions, in order to free the rational mind for an understanding of nature’s order which was as yet unknown. Now it’s time to further an understanding of nature’s order by reassimilating those passions which were originally fled from.

Gumption is the psychic gasoline that keeps the whole thing going. If you haven’t got it there’s no way the motorcycle can possibly be fixed. But if you have got it and know how to keep it there’s absolutely no way in this whole world that motorcycle can keep from getting fixed. It’s bound to happen. Therefore the thing that must be monitored at all times and preserved before anything else is the gumption.

You just sit and stare and think, and search randomly for new information, and go away and come back again, and after a while the unseen factors start to emerge.