Robert M. Pirsig Quotes

When you talk and think of the Absolute, you have to do it in the relative; so all these logical arguments apply.

Yet, the Universe is real enough to the conscious beings in it, which are as unreal as it is itself.

Logic doesn't apply to the real world. D. R. Hofstadter and D. C. Dennett (eds.) The Mind's I, 1981.

Nothing is more abstract than reality.

There is much more mystery in the shadow of a man walking on a sunny day, than in all religions of the world.

Windbags can be right. Aphorists can be wrong. It is a tough world.

Everything is true and not true about everything. That’s one thing I’ve learned.

Mankind is a science that defies definitions.

We're extremely fortunate not to know precisely the kind of world we live in. One would have to live a long, long time, unquestionably longer than the world itself.

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

Quid est ergo tempus? Si nemo ex me quaerat, scio; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio. What, then, is time? I know well enough what it is, provided that nobodyasksme; but if Iamasked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled.

The world divides into facts.

We will first understand how simple the universe is when we recognize how strange it is.

I don't think the world objectively exists the way we think it exists. There's a constant sort of storytelling process.

Reality has always had too many heads.

The world is not magic - and that's the most magical thing about it.

One man's antinomy is another man's falsidical paradox, give or take a couple of thousand years.

An infinite personality is an infinite impossibility.

Repeat, over and over again, in case anyone forgets it or believes the contrary, that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds.

Everything is illusion. Even that last sentence.

To philosophize with open eyes is to philosophize in the dark. Only the blind can look straight at the sun.

One is fruitful only at the cost of being rich in contradictions.

I love the world, because I love the mind that created the world.

The truth is always an abyss.

The desire for order is the only order in the world.