Robert M. Pirsig Quotes

One is unable to notice something because it is always before one's eyes.

Two young salmon are swimming along one day. As they do, they are passed by a wiser, older fish coming the other way. The wiser fish greets the two as he passes, saying, "Morning boys, how's the water?" The other two continue to swim in silence for a little while, until the first one turns to the other and asks, "What the hell is water?"

Familiarity can blind too.

Humans often fail to see what is close to them and obvious to others.

We have been so blinded by thinking and feeling that we have never seen the World.

Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be what they truly are.

The most obvious things are often right there, but you don't think about them because you've narrowed your vision.

For as the eyes of bats are to the blaze of day, so is the reason in our soul to the things which are by nature most evident of all.

The hardest thing to see is what is in front of your eyes.

The longer you experience a scene, you tend to accept what's going on.

Sometimes the very thing you're looking for is the one thing you cannot see.

The aspects of a thing that are most important to us are hidden to us because of their simplicity and familiarity.

There are many who stumble in the noon-day, not for want of light, but for want of eyes.

Like all familiar objects, it had become invisible.

The blind see what they want to see.

Why does man not see things? He is himself standing in the way: he conceals things.

Sometimes I'm confused by what I think is really obvious. But what I think is really obvious obviously isn't obvious.

How can it be so unclear to her when it's like the fingers on my hand to me?

Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.

Habituation puts to sleep the eye of our judgment.

How quickly one accepts the incredible if only one sees it enough.

Familiarity so dulls the edge of perception as to make us least acquainted with things forming part of our daily life.

We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.

The obvious is the hardest thing of all to point out to anyone who has genuinely lost sight of it.

The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.