The funny thing about insane people is that it is kind of the opposite of being a celebrity. Nobody envies you.

- Robert M. Pirsig

What I am is a heretic who's recanted and, thereby, in everyone's eyes, saved his soul. Everyone's eyes but one, who knows deep down inside that all he has saved is his skin.

- Robert M. Pirsig

Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20 - 20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go.

- Robert M. Pirsig

The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.

- Robert M. Pirsig

We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people's lives.

- Robert M. Pirsig

The solutions all are simple - after you have arrived at them. But they're simple only when you know already what they are.

- Robert M. Pirsig

Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.

- Robert M. Pirsig

The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.

- Robert M. Pirsig

Quality is the Buddha.

- Robert M. Pirsig

There's no such thing as morality.

- Robert M. Pirsig

I did not want to write one of those sequels that famous first-book authors get into where everybody says, 'Oh yeah.'

- Robert M. Pirsig

I really don't mind dying because I figure I haven't wasted this life.

- Robert M. Pirsig

If you run from technology, it will chase you.

- Robert M. Pirsig

Up until my first book was published, I had all this potential, people would say, and I screwed up. After it, I could say: 'No, I didn't screw up.'

- Robert M. Pirsig

I have money, fame, a happy wife, our daughter Nell.

- Robert M. Pirsig

It's the dualistic ways of looking at things that produces the evil.

- Robert M. Pirsig

People are all at sixes and sevens with each other. They're always quarreling. They never somehow resolve anything.

- Robert M. Pirsig

The Buddha resides as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain.

- Robert M. Pirsig

Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organise themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive?

- Robert M. Pirsig

It is not good to talk about Zen, because Zen is nothingness... If you talk about it, you are always lying, and if you don't talk about it, no one knows it is there.

- Robert M. Pirsig