Tag: Robert Pirsig

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.