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"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."
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"Experience is a master teacher, even when it's not our own."

"I believe we have an obligation to read for pleasure, in private and in public places. If we read for pleasure, if others see us reading, then we learn, we exercise our imaginations. We show others that reading is a good t."

"I do not play this instrument so well as I should wish to, but I have always supposed that to be my own fault because I would not take the trouble of practicing."

"Always we learn things and then we forget them."

"Ultimately, nobody can get more out of things, including books, than he already knows."

"Humanity had to expand the limits of its consciousness to learn to ask the right questions."

"One of the disadwantages of school and learning, he thought dreamily, was that the mind seemed to have the tendency too see and represent all things as though they were flat and had only two dimensions. This, somehow, seemed to render all matters of intellect shallow and worthless."
Explore more quotes by Robert M. Pirsig


"He comments on how amazing it is that everything in the universe can be described by the twenty-six written characters with which they have been working. His (Korean) friends nod and smile and eat the food they've taken from tins and say no pleasantly."


"When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called a Religion."


"When spontaneity and individuality and really good original stuff occurred in a classroom it was in spite of the instruction, not because of it. This seemed to make sense. He was ready to resign. Teaching dull conformity to hateful students wasn't what he wanted to do."


"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."


"Why should an irrational method work when rational methods were all so rotten? He had an intuitive feeling, growing rapidly, that what he had stumbled on was no small gimmick. It went far beyond. How far, he didn't know."


"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."


"Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless speed up. If you become winded slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then when you're no longer thinking ahead each footstep isn't just a means to an end but a unique event in itself."


"We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with noartistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all,and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly."
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