Quotes by Robert Pirsig

• The only Zen you can find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.
• The solutions all are simple - after you have arrived at them. But they're simple only when you know already what they are.
• The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands.
• The truth knocks on the door and you say, go away, I'm looking for the truth, and it goes away. Puzzling.
• Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.
• One geometry cannot be more true than another; it can only be more convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.
• Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food.
• Even in the presence of others he was completely alone.
• To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.
• 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.
• It is a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away. Puzzling.
• We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people's lives.
• To live for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.