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Robert M. Pirsig

"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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"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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"I don't claim to know everything, Wally. I only claim that everything can eventually be known."

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"I came to this world to bloom and spread my love to fill the world with happiness."

Explore more quotes by Robert M. Pirsig

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Robert M. Pirsig
"One of the most moral acts is to create a space in which life can move forward."
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Robert M. Pirsig
"Like those in the valley behind us, most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships."
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Robert M. Pirsig
"To some extent the romantic condemnation of rationality stems from the very effectiveness of rationality in uplifting men from primitive conditions."
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Robert M. Pirsig
"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..."
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Robert M. Pirsig
"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."
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Robert M. Pirsig
"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."
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Robert M. Pirsig
"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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Robert M. Pirsig
"We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with the emphasis on 'good' rather than on 'time'...."
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Robert M. Pirsig
"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."
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Robert M. Pirsig
"An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality."
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