Tag Archives: Robert Pirsig

Reading Lila – Insanity

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

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Reading Lila – Ruthlessness

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

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Reading Lila – Hippies

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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.

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Reading Lila – Paradise

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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.

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Reading Lila – Indians & Cowboys

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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.

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Reading Lila – Intellect

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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.

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Reading Lila – World War I

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

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Reading Lila – Celebrity

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

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Reading Lila – Science

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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.

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Reading Lila – New York

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

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Reading Lila – Sex & Me & We

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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.

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Reading Lila – Morals – Ideas Kill Societies

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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.

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Reading Lila – Better is Everything

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

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Reading Lila – Machine Language

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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.

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Reading Lila – Carbon

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

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Reading Lila – Chemistry Professors

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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.

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Reading Lila – Dynamic is Better, Static is Good Too

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

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Reading Lila – Dynamic & Static

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Static Quality emerges in the wake of Dynamic Quality.

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Reading Lila – Platypus

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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.

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Reading Lila – Metaphysics of Quality

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… 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.

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