Robert M. Pirsig

"A culture-bearing book, like a mule, bears the culture on its back. No one should sit down to write one deliberately. Culture-bearing books occur almost accidentally, like a sudden change in the stock…"

"I think metaphysics is good if it improves everyday life; otherwise forget it."

"They had made the mistake of thinking of a personality as some sort of possession, like a suit of clothes, which a person wears. But apart from a personality what is there? Some bones and flesh. A col…"

"It is an immortal dialogue, strange and puzzling at first, but then hitting you harder and harder, like truth itself. What Phædrus has been talking about as Quality, Socrates appears to have described…"

"You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow. When people are fana…"

"When it is known that Plato put his own words in Socrates' mouth there should be no reason to doubt that he could have put his own words into other mouths too."

"What's happening is that each year our old flat earth of conventional reason becomes less and less adequate to handle the experiences we have and this is creating widespread feelings of topsy-turvines…"

"robertpirsig.org A website containing a number of papers concerned with the Metaphysics of Quality"