Robert M. Pirsig Quotes About Quality

Quotes about: Quality

• Care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing. A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who’s bound to have some characteristic of quality.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Quality, Who Cares, Doe

• Art is anything you can do well. Anything you can do with quality.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Art, Quality, Wells

  NPR Interview, 1974.

• Making an art out of your technological life is the way to solve the problem of technology...Art is anything that you can do well. Anything that you can do with Quality.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Art, Creativity, Technology

  NPR Interview, 1974.

• Absence of Quality is the essence of squareness.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Essence, Quality, Absence

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

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Knowledge, Independent, Learning

  Robert M. Pirsig (1991). “LILA An Inquriry into Morals”

• Man is not the source of all things, as the subjective idealists would say. Nor is he the passive observer of all things, as the objective idealists would say. The Quality which creates the world emerges as a relationship between man and his experience. He is a participant in the creation of all things. The measure of all things.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Men, Unity, Quality

  "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, Ch. 29, 1974.

• Quality tends to fan out like waves. The Quality job he didn't think anyone was going to see was seen, and the person who feels it is a little bit better because of it, and is likely to pass that feeling onto others, and in that way the Quality tends to keep going.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Jobs, Thinking, Feelings

  "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

• To an experienced Zen Buddhist, asking if one believes in Zen or one believes in the Buddha, sounds a little ludicrous, like asking if one believes in air or water. Similarly Quality is not something you believe in, Quality is something you experience.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Buddhist, Believe, Air

• Quality is better seen up at the timberline than here obscured by smoky windows and oceans of words, and he sees that what he is talking about can never really be accepted here because to see it one has to be free of social authority and this is an institution of social authority. Quality for sheep is what the shepherd says. And if you take a sheep and put it up at the timberline at night when the wind is roaring, that sheep will be panicked half to death and will call and call until the shepherd comes, or comes the wolf.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Ocean, Night, Wind

  "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

• A culture-bearing book, like a mule, bears the culture on its back. No one should sit down to write one deliberately. Culture-bearing books appear almost accidentally, like a sudden surge in the stock market. There are books of high quality that are a part of the culture, but that is not the same. They are a part of it. They aren't carrying it anywhere. They may talk about insanity sympathetically, for example, because that's the standard cultural attitude. But they don't carry any suggestion that insanity might be something other than sickness or degeneracy.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Attitude, Book, Writing

  "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, Afterword to the 10th anniversary edition, written in Gothenburg, Sweden, 1984.

• Dialectic, which is the parent of logic, came itself from rhetoric. Rhetoric is in turn the child of the myths and poetry of ancient Greece. That is so historically, and that is so by any application of common sense. The poetry and myths are the response of a prehistoric people to the Universe around them made on the basis of Quality. It is Quality, not dialectic, which is the generator of everything we know.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Children, People, Common Sense

  "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

• Now, to take that which has caused us to create the world, and include it within the world we have created, is clearly impossible. This is why Quality cannot be defined. If we do define it, we are defining something less than Quality itself.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Quality, World, Defining

  "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

• What the Metaphysics of Quality would do is take this separate category, Quality, and show how it contains within itself both subjects and objects. The Metaphysics of Quality would show how things become enormously more coherent-fabulously more coherent-when you start with an assumption that Quality is the primary empirical reality of the world. . . . . . . but showing that, of course, was a very big job. . . .

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Jobs, Reality, Quality

  Robert M. Pirsig (1991). “LILA An Inquriry into Morals”

• Quality tends to fan out like waves.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Quality, Fans, Wave

  "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

• The sun of quality does not revolve around the subjects and objects of our existence. It does not just passively illuminate them. It is not subordinate to them in any way. It has CREATED them. They are subordinate to IT.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Quality, Doe, Way

• Any person of any philosophic persuasion who sits on a hot stove will verify without any intellectual argument whatsoever that he is in an undeniably low-quality situation: that the value of his predicament is negative. This low quality is not just a vague, woolly-headed, crypto-religious, metaphysical abstraction. It is an experience. It is not a judgment about an experience. It is not a description of experience. The value itself is an experience. As such it is completely predictable. It is verifiable by anyone who cares to do so.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Religious, Intellectual, Quality

  "Lila : An Inquiry Into Morals". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1991.

• An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Acceptance, Keys, Understanding

• Even though quality cannot be defined, you know what quality is.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Quality, Knows, Defined

  "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, April 1, 1974.

• Programs of a political nature are important end products of social quality that can be effective only if the underlying structure of social values is right. The social values are right only if the individual values are right. The place to improve the world is first in one's heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Heart, Social Values, Hands

  "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, Ch. 25, 1974.

• Within a Metaphysics of Quality, science is a set of static intellectual patterns describing this reality, but the patterns are not the reality they describe.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Reality, Intellectual, Quality

  Robert M. Pirsig (1991). “LILA An Inquriry into Morals”

• Quality... you know what it is, yet you don't know what it is.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Understanding, Quality, Zen Motorcycle Maintenance

• What I mean (and everybody else means) by the word 'quality' cannot be broken down into subjects and predicates. This is not because Quality is so mysterious but because Quality is so simple, immediate and direct.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Mean, Simple, Broken

  "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

• The birth of a new fact is always a wonderful thing to experience. It's dualistically called a "discovery" because of the presumption that it has an existence independent of anyone's awareness of it. When it comes along, it always has, at first, a low value. Then, depending on the value-looseness of the observer and the potential quality of the fact, its value increases, either slowly or rapidly, or the value wanes and the fact disappears.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Independent, Discovery, Quality

• Stuckness shouldn't be avoided. It's the psychic predecessor of all real understanding. An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality, in mechanical work as in other endeavors.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Real, Acceptance, Keys

• Any philosophic explanation of Quality is going to be both false and true precisely because it is a philosophic explanation. The process of philosophic explanation is an analytic process, a process of breaking something down into subjects and predicates. What I mean (and everybody else means) by the word 'quality' cannot be broken down into subjects and predicates. This is not because Quality is so mysterious but because Quality is so simple, immediate and direct.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Mean, Simple, Broken

  "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

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