Tag Archives: Robert Pirsig

The mythos is the social culture and the rhetoric which the culture must invent before philosophy becomes possible

Just as mystics traditionally seek monasteries and ashrams … so are the insane treated by isolation in places of relative calm and austerity and silence.

The value of shock treatment is not that it returns a lunatic to normal cultural patterns. It certainly does not do that. It’s value is that it destroys all patterns … cultural and private, and leaves the patient temporarily in a Dynamic state …

Religious mysticism is one of those delusions that isn’t called insane only because there are so many people involved …

Dynamic Quality is a higher moral order than scientific truth, and it is as immoral for philosophers of science to try to suppress Dynamic Quality as it is for church authorities to suppress scientific method. Dynamic value is an integral part of science. It is the cutting edge of scientific progress itself.

Sometimes the insane and the contrarians and the ones who are closest to suicide are the most valuable people society has …

… the insane person is running a private unapproved film which he happens to like better than the current cultural one …

When a cartoonist wants to show someone getting a great idea he puts an electric bulb over the character’s head. Everybody understands … Why?

Your static value system filters out the undesirable opinions & preserves the desirable ones … it isn’t just opinions that get filtered out. It’s also data.

Insanity isn’t an ‘object’ of observation. It’s an alteration of observation itself …

Today we are living in an intellectual and technological paradise and a moral and social nightmare.

The intellect’s evolutionary purpose has never been to discover an ultimate meaning of the universe. That is a relatively recent fad. It’s historical purpose has been to help a society find food, detect danger, and defeat enemies.

Paradise was always at the end of some intellectual, technological ride, but you knew that when you got there paradise wouldn’t be there either.

The moral values that were replacing the old European Victorian ones were the moral values of American Indians: kindness to children,maximum freedom, openness of speech, love of simplicity, affinity for nature.

When the social climate changes from preposterous social restraint of all intellect to a relative abandonment of all social patterns, the result is a hurricane of social forces.

Biology beat death billions of years ago. Society beat biology thousands of years ago. But intellect and society are still fighting it out…

You can measure the quality of a university by comparing the relative strengths of the celebrity patterns and the intellectual patterns.

If scientists had simply said Copernicus was right and Ptolemy was wrong without any willingness to further investigate the subject, then science would have simply become another minor religious creed.

Biological man doesn’t invent cities or societies any more than pigs and chickens invent the farmer that feeds them.

The language of mental intelligence has nothing to say to the cells directly. They don’t understand it. The language of the cells has nothing to say to the mind directly. It doesn’t speak that language either.

Just as it is more moral for a doctor to kill a germ than a patient, so it is more moral for an idea to kill a society than it is for a society to kill an idea.

If chemistry professors exercise choice, and chemistry professors are composed exclusively of atoms, then it follows that atoms must exercise choice too.

Trying to explain social moral patterns in terms of inorganic chemistry patterns is like trying to explain the plot of a word-processor novel in terms of a computer’s electronics. You can’t do it.

Evolution can’t be a continuous forward movement. It must be a process of ratchet-like steps …

If we leave a chemistry professor out on a rock in the sun long enough the forces of nature will convert him into simple compounds.

Life can’t exist on dynamic quality alone. It has no staying power.

Static Quality emerges in the wake of Dynamic Quality.

The world comes to us in an endless stream of puzzle pieces that we would like to think all fit together somehow, but that in fact never do.

… one can then examine intellectual realities the same way he examines paintings in an art gallery, not with an effort to find the ‘real’ painting, but simply to enjoy and keep those that are of value.

small boats stopping right there is what got the city started in the first place

Getting drunk and picking up bar-ladies and writing metaphysics is a part of life.

I was born where there were no enclosures, and where everything drew a free breath.