Robert M. Pirsig Quotes

First you get the feeling, then you figure out why.

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 abs...

Gumption is the psychic gasoline that keeps the whole thing going.

He discovered that the science he’d once thought of as the whole world of knowledge is only a branch of philosophy, which is far broader and far more general. The questions he had asked about infinite...

He is not stubborn, not narrow-minded, not lazy, not stupid. There was just no easy explanation. So it was left up in the air, a kind of mystery that one gives up on because there is no sense in just...

Here by far the most frustrating gumption trap is inadequate tools. Nothing’s quite so demoralizing as a tool hang-up. Buy good tools as you can afford them and you’ll never regret

I always feel like I’m in church when I do this…The

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 disco...

I had been seeing that shim in a kind of intellectual, rational, cerebral way in which the scientific properties of the metal were all that counted. John was going at it immediately and intuitively, g...

I hope later she will see and feel a thing about these prairies I have given up talking to others about; a thing that exists here because everything else does not and can be noticed because other thin...

I know what it is! We’ve arrived at the West Coast! We’re all strangers again! Folks, I just forgot the biggest gumption trap of all. The funeral procession! The one everybody’s in, this hyped-up, fuc...

I think that if we are going to reform the world, and make it a better place to live in, the way to do it is not with talk about relationships of the political nature… I think that kind of approach st...

I was an outsider who seemed more interested in attacking what was being taught than learning from it.

If one person complains he just makes it that much harder for the others. They’ve got stamina. They know how to keep on going.

If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything.

In all of the Oriental religions great value is placed on the Sanskrit doctrine of Tat tvam asi, Thou art that, which asserts that everything you think you are and everything you think you perceive ar...

In this Chautauqua I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too o...

It’s sometimes argued that there’s no real progress; that a civilization that kills multitudes in mass warfare, that pollutes the land and oceans with ever larger quantities of debris, that destroys t...

John looks at the motorcycle and he sees steel in various shapes and has negative feelings about these steel shapes and turns off the whole thing. I look at the shapes of the steel now and I see ideas...

Mathematical solutions are selected by the subliminal self on the basis of mathematical beauty, of the harmony of numbers and forms, of geometric elegance.