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"What he's looking for, what he wants, is all around him, but he doesn't want that because it is all around him. Every step's an effort, both physically and spiritually, because he imagines his goal to be external and distant."
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"You may spend fifty or eighty years of your life believing in something totally false, and this is what happens to most people!"

"The average adult has had sex innumerable times more than they have formed an opinion of their own."

"His ear heard more than what was said to him, and his slow speech had overtones not of thought, but of understanding beyond thought."

"It wasn't until I slowed the car and rolled down the windows that I realized I spend most of my days driving 'through' life without driving 'in' life. So, I've decided to walk because the pace is slower and the windows are always down."

"There are two kinds of people in this world: those who follow the popular majority, and those who possess good sense. In other words, you can either let the crowd steer you right over a cliff, or you can stop to peer beyond the brink and see how a fall will likely end in tragedy."

"A person who looks at the table and can see the universe is a person who can see the way."

"When we stay locked up in the spectrum of unsolved life stories and keep hiding in an arcane prism, life remains a mystery behind perpetual tensions and a journey in a world beyond appearances. ['Une femme peut en cacher une autre']"

"Awareness makes us emotionally brilliant."

"When you start using senses you've neglected, your reward is to see the world with completely fresh eyes."
Explore more quotes by Robert M. Pirsig


"It was the ghost of rationality itself ... This is the ghost of normal everyday assumptions which declares that the ultimate purpose of life, which is to keep alive, is impossible, but that this is the ultimate purpose of life anyway, so that great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose. That is what the ghost says."


"Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20 - 20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go."


"Pretty mountains, pretty river, bumpy but pleasant tar road... old buildings, old people on a front porch... strange how old, obsolete buildings and plants and mills, the technology of fifty and a hundred years ago, always seem to look so much better than the new stuff."


"When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things. I just want to get at it slowly, but carefully and thoroughly, with the same attitude I remember was present just before I found that sheared pin. It was that attitude that found it, nothing else."


"We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with the emphasis on 'good' rather than on 'time'...."


"The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality, not the other way around."


"We're living in topsy-turvy times, and I think that what causes the topsy-turvy feeling is inadequacy of old forms of thought to deal with new experiences. I've heard it said that the only real learning results from hang-ups, where instead of expanding the branches of what you already know, you have to stop and drift laterally for a while until you come across something that allows you to expand the roots of what you already know. Everyone's familiar with that. I think the same thing occurs with whole civilizations when expansion's needed at the roots."
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