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"If you can't define something you have no formal rational way of knowing that it exists. Neither can you really tell anyone else what it is. There is, in fact, no formal difference between inability to define and stupidity."
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"Let each person decide his or her fate."

"Beauty, love with truth, that is all there is."

"The Judgement is not a question, it's a sure answer, as to a clump of dough, that will yeast and rise, or go in the oven and burn to crust."

"Can any man sacrifice is life for his fellow man?"

"I guess it's better to have a chalk smile, than an ink smile. Where chalk changes with the direction of wind, ink stays as a deep stain. Like rain, sun and hail against a fake plant."

"Minimalism means not trying to improve perfection."

"Life cannot be exchange for anything."

"Beauty is the brightness of being."

"The voice says, maybe you don't go to hell for the things you do. Maybe you go to hell for the things you don't do. The things you don't finish."

"Life is like a lit cigarette. The past is ashes, the present is burning, and the future is up in smoke. Fast as a breath; inhale exhale."
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."


"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."


"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."
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