25 May 2021

Robert M Pirsig - Collected Quotes

"An experiment is a failure only when it also fails adequately to test the hypothesis in question, when the data it produces don't prove anything one way or the other." (Robert M Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", 1974)

"Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts. Laws of logic, or mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts. The whole blessed thing is a human invention, including the idea that it isn't a human invention." (Robert M Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", 1974)

"Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions." (Robert M Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", 1974)

"Technology presumes there's just one right way to do things and there never is." (Robert M Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", 1974)

"The number of rational hypotheses that can explain any given phenomenon is infinite." (Robert M. Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", 1974)

"The solutions all are simple - after you have arrived at them. But they're simple only when you know already what they are."(Robert M Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", 1974)

"The world comes to us in an endless stream of puzzle pieces that we would like to think all fit together somehow, but that in fact never do."(Robert M Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", 1974)

"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." (Robert M Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", 1974)

"When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process." (Robert M Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", 1974)

"Within a Metaphysics of Quality, science is a set of static intellectual patterns describing this reality, but the patterns are not the reality they describe." (Robert M Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", 1974)

"Data without generalization is just gossip." (Robert M Pirsig, "Lila: An Inquiry into Morals", 1991)

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