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"Grades really cover up failure to teach. A bad instructor can go through an entire quarter leaving absolutely nothing memorable in the minds of his class, curve out the scores on an irrelevant test, and leave the impression that some have learned and some have not. But if the grades are removed the class is forced to wonder each day what it's really learning. The questions, What's being taught? What's the goal? How do the lectures and assignments accomplish the goal? become ominous. The removal of grades exposes a huge and frightening vacuum."
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"Adult librarians are like lazy bakers: their patrons want a jelly doughnut, so they give them a jelly doughnut. Children's librarians are ambitious bakers: 'You like the jelly doughnut? I'll get you a jelly doughnut. But you should try my cruller, too. My cruller is gonna blow your mind, kid."
"The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not."
"Ask yourself how many people you have met who grumbled at a thing as incurable, and how many who attacked it as curable? How many people we have heard abuse the British elementary schools, as they would abuse the British climate? How few have we met who realized that British education can be altered, but British weather cannot?...For a thousand that regret compulsory education, where is the hundred, or the ten, or the one, who would repeal compulsory education? At the beginning of our epoch men talked with equal ease about Reform and Repeal. Now everybody talks about reform; nobody talks about repeal."
"While in Bombay, I began, on one hand, my study of Indian law and, on the other, my experiments in dietetics in which Virchand Gandhi, a friend, joined me. My brother, for his part was trying his best to get me briefs. The study of India law was a tedious business. The Civil Procedure Code I could in no way get on with. Not so however, with the Evidence Act. Virchand Gandhi was reading for the Solicitor's Examination and would tell me all sorts of stories about Barristers and Vakils."
"I believe that which you study is only matched in importance by the sincerity with which you approach it."
Explore more quotes by Robert M. Pirsig
"One of the most moral acts is to create a space in which life can move forward."
"To some extent the romantic condemnation of rationality stems from the very effectiveness of rationality in uplifting men from primitive conditions."
"If I hold my head to the left and look down at the handle grips and front wheel and map carrier and gas tank I get one pattern of sense data. If I move my head to the right I get another slightly different pattern of sense data. The two views are different. The angles of the planes and curves of the metal are different. The sunlight strikes them differently. If there's no logical basis for substance then there's no logical basis for concluding that what's produced these two views is the same motorcycle."
"He'd no longer be a grade-motivated person. He'd be a knowledge-motivated person. He would need no external pushing to learn. His push would come from inside. He'd be a free man. He wouldn't need a lot of discipline to shape him up. In fact, if the instructors assigned him were slacking on the job he would be likely to shape them up by asking rude questions. He'd be there to learn something, would be paying to learn something and they'd better come up with it.Motivation of this sort, once it catches hold, is a ferocious force..."
"Not everyone understands what a completely rational process this is, this maintenance of a motorcycle. They think it's some kind of 'knack' or some kind of 'affinity for machines' in operation. They are right, but the knack is almost purely a process of reason, and most of the troubles are caused by what old time radio men called a 'short between the earphones,' failures to use the head properly. A motorcycle functions entirely in accordance with the laws of reason, and a study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself."
"He felt that institutions such as schools, churches, governments and political organizations of every sort all tended to direct thought for ends other than truth, for the perpetuation of their own functions, and for the control of individuals in the service of these functions. He came to see his early failure as a lucky break, an accidental escape from a trap that had been set for him, and he was very trap-wary about institutional truths for the remainder of his time."
"The primitive tribes permitted far less individual freedom than does modern society. Ancient wars were committed with far less moral justification than modern ones. A technology that produces debris can find, and is finding, ways of disposing of it without ecological upset. And the schoolbook pictures of primitive man sometimes omit some of the detractions of his primitive life - the pain, the disease, famine, the hard labor needed just to stay alive. From that agony of bare existence to modern life can be soberly described only as upward progress, and the sole agent for this progress is quite clearly reason itself."
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