Robert M. Pirsig Quotes

If you impose morality on people, they will find ways to circumvent their guilt. They will make offerings to temples - or other places of worship - but also continue doing things that make them feel guilty.

I was living a complete lie. But unfortunately, guilt doesn't make you stop.

No habit or quality is more easily acquired than hypocrisy, nor any thing sooner learned than to deny the sentiments of our hearts and the principle we act from: but the seeds of every passion are innate to us, and nobody comes into the world without them.

I'd stand in line for Confession with old people and little kids, and as the line moved up, I knew when I got into the box that I would lie! Again!

Most people sell their souls, and live with a good conscience on the proceeds.

I do all the evil I can before I learn to shun it? Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up.

What most men call their conscience is imaginary virtue switching left or right according to self-interest.

I was about to be a preacher, but I was a sinner.

You may be sure that when a man begins to call himself a realist he is preparing to do something that he is secretly ashamed of doing.

Better to stay alive," I said. "At least while there's a chance to get free." I thought of the sleeping pills in my bag and wondered just how great a hypocrite I was. It was so easy to advise other people to live with their pain.

There are many who have grave scruples about deceiving but think it as nothing to deceive themselves.

Deep down in me I knowed it was a lie, and He knowed it. You can't pray a lie - I found that out.

Whoever aims publicly at great things and at length perceives secretly that he is too weak to achieve them, has usually also insufficient strength to renounce his aims publicly, and then inevitably becomes a hypocrite.

How frightened hypocrisy hastens to defend itself.

It is quite gratifying to feel guilty if you haven't done anything wrong: how noble! Whereas it is rather hard and certainly depressing to admit guilt and to repent.

It was then that I realized that while playing the well-meaning tolerant individual (in short: liberal) garnered you fans and grades, it didn't matter. In my heart and head, I was a fraud.

Tolstoy said, 'The antagonism between life and conscience may be removed either by a change of life or by a change of conscience.' Many of us have elected to adjust our consciences rather than our lives. Our powers of rationalization are unlimited. They allow us to live in luxury and indifference while others, whom we could help if we chose to, starve and go to hell.

God knows, I'm not the thing I should be, Nor am I even the thing I could be, But twenty times I rather would be An atheist clean, Than under gospel colours hid be Just for a screen.

We never ask God to forgive anybody except when we haven't.

The sad thing is that many of us come to Christ because we are sinners, and then spend the rest of our lives trying to pretend that we are not!

To save myself, I destroyed another, and in doing so, I destroyed myself.

All holy piety in public, and all peeled grapes and self-indulgence in private.

That's the illusion - the idea that you can be all right on the inside and not act it out - and it has affected us in many ways. That's a part of the idea that professing is enough.

Much guilt arises in the life of the believer from practicing the chameleon life of environmental adaptation.

I'm a hypocrite, of course, and I live with that, but I live.