Robert M. Pirsig

The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands.

Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20 - 20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go.

I have money, fame, a happy wife, our daughter Nell.

For me, a writer should be more like a lighthouse keeper, just out there by himself. He shouldn't get his ideas from other people all around him.

Even in the presence of others he was completely alone.

What I am is a heretic who's recanted and, thereby, in everyone's eyes, saved his soul. Everyone's eyes but one, who knows deep down inside that all he has saved is his skin.

To live for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.

To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.

I really don't mind dying because I figure I haven't wasted this life.

Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.

Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organise themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive?

The funny thing about insane people is that it is kind of the opposite of being a celebrity. Nobody envies you.