Robert M. Pirsig Quotes

Quality in a product or service is not what the supplier puts in. It is what the customer gets out and is willing to pay for. A product is not quality because it is hard to make and costs a lot of money, as manufacturers typically believe. This is incompetence. Customers pay only for what is of use to them and gives them value. Nothing else constitutes quality.

Quality isn't a thing. It is an event.

Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the client or customer gets out of it.

The price point and the quality are very rare. I don't want people thinking, "I got the look for less." I want them thinking, "I got the look!"

Customers pay only for what is of use to them and gives them value. Nothing else constitutes quality.

Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.

Product quality has almost nothing to do with defects or their lack.

Leadership is like beauty - it's hard to define but you know it when you see it.

It is not so easy to obtain a reputation by a perfect work as to enhance the value of an indifferent one by a reputation already acquired.

Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness. To define beauty not in the most abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible, not to find a universal formula for it, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics.

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

Every subject at some phase of its development should possess, what is for the individual concerned with it, an aesthetic quality.

I am an arrogant and impatient listener, but in the case of a few composers, a very few, when I hear a work I do not like, I am convinced that it is my own fault. Verdi is one of those composers.

There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer’s estimation of a work in progress & its actual quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, & the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.

Originality is in the eye of the beholder.

I learned a little of beauty - enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth.

To gain control over the quality of experience, one needs to learn how to build enjoyment into what happens day in, day out.

Two things are not debatable: eroticism, and comedy. If you don't think it's sexy, or funny, there's no way I can change your mind.

The terms good and bad indicate no positive quality in things regarded in themselves, but are merely modes of thinking or notions, which we form from the comparison of things one with another. Thus one and the same thing can be at the same time good, bad, and indifferent. For instance, music is good for him that is melancholy, bad for him that mourns; for him that is deaf; it is neither good nor bad.

Meaning is like pornography, you know it when you see it.

Value is a perception not a calculation. Value is something people feel, not something we tell them they get

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.

Is it possible he should know what he is, and be that he is?

When you've understood this scripture, throw it away. If you can't understand this scripture, throw it away. I insist on your freedom.

The errors of the observer come from the qualities of the human mind.