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"Historically mystics have claimed that for a true understanding of reality metaphysics is too 'scientific. Metaphysics is not reality. Metaphysics is names about reality. Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty-thousand-page menu and no food."
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"The only way you can talk about this great tide in which you're a participant is as Schopenhauer did: the universe is a dream dreamed by a single dreamer where all the dream characters dream too."
"The unrest which keeps the never-stopping clock metaphysics going is the thought that the non-existence of this world is just as possible as its existence."
"You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened."
"If there are infinite dimensions then there would be infinite alternate realities and if there are infinite alternate realities we would exist in almost all of them that would make all of us omnipresent..."
"The more pleasure a universe can yield, other things being equal, the more beneficent and generous is its general nature; the more pains its constitution involves, the darker and more malign its total temper. To deny this would seem impossible, yet it is done daily; for there is nothing people will not maintain when they are slaves to superstition; and candor and a sense of justice are, in such a case, the first things lost."
"What is the nature of the Self (Soul)? To 'see' the dharma (function) of everything, to see 'who is performing what function, and how that function is being performed.' To 'see' it, is called the function of the Self (Soul)."
"In eternity there is no time, only an instant long enough for a joke."
"More focus has been placed on these subjects through human history than on anything else-mystery and mysticism, God, imagination, intuition, the nature of relationships, human purpose, happiness and salvation."
"The core is harmonic regularity, the outer darkness is random noise, we are in the space between them. Every engine takes advantage of a difference. These two extremes are woven into each other. The eternal now is the processing of meaning."
Explore more quotes by Robert M. Pirsig
"To some extent the romantic condemnation of rationality stems from the very effectiveness of rationality in uplifting men from primitive conditions."
"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."
"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."
"Bill arrives with a grin about something. Sure, he's got some jets for my machine and knows right were they are. I'll have to wait a second though. He's got to close a deal out in back on some Harley parts. I go with him out in a shed in back and see he is selling a whole Harley machine in used parts, except for the frame, which the customer already has. He is selling them all for $125. Not a bad price at all.Coming back I comment, 'He'll know something about motorcycles before he gets those together.'Bill laughs. 'And that's the best way to learn, too."
"And what is written well and what is written badly...need we ask Lysias or any other poet or orator who ever wrote or will write either a political or other work, in meter or out of meter, poet or prose writer, to teach us this?' What is good, PhASdrus, and what is not good...need we ask anyone to tell us these things?"
"This larger goal wouldn't be the imitation of education in Universities today, glossed over and concealed by grades and degrees that give the appearance of something happening when, in fact, almost nothing is going on. It would be the real thing."
"The range of human knowledge today is so great that we're all specialists and the distance between specializations has become so great that anyone who seeks to wander freely between them almost has to forego closeness with the people around him."
"I don't know why-it's just that-I don't know-they're not kin.'-Surprising word, I think to myself never used it before. Not of kin-sounds like hillbilly talk-not of a kind-same root-kindness, too-they can't have real kindness toward him, they're not his kin -- . That's exactly the feeling. Old word, so ancient it's almost drowned out. What a change through the centuries. Now anybody can be 'kind.' And everybody's supposed to be. Except that long ago it was something you were born into and couldn't help. Now it's just a faked-up attitude half the time, like teachers the first day of class. But what do they really know about kindness who are not kin."
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