It's paradoxical that were people are the most closely crowded, in the big coastal cities in the East and West, the loneliness is the greatest.

ROBERT M. PIRSIG, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Institutions such as schools, churches, governments and political organizations of every sort all tended to direct thought for ends other than truth, for the perpetuation of their own functions, and for the control of individuals in the service of these functions.

ROBERT M. PIRSIG, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans.

ROBERT M. PIRSIG, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance.

ROBERT M. PIRSIG, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

The purpose of scientific method is to select a single truth from among many hypothetical truths. That, more than anything else, is what science is all about. But historically science has done exactly the opposite. Through multiplication upon multiplication of facts, information, theories and hypotheses, it is science itself that is leading mankind from single absolute truths to multiple indeterminate, relative ones.

ROBERT M. PIRSIG, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

It's nice to start journeys pleasantly, even when you know they won't end that way.

ROBERT M. PIRSIG, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

The real evil isn't the objects of technology but the tendency of technology to isolate people into lonely attitudes of objectivity. It's the objectivity, the dualistic way of looking at things underlying technology, that produces the evil.

ROBERT M. PIRSIG, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Socrates is not just expounding noble ideas in a vacuum. He is in the middle of a war between those who think truth is absolute and those who think truth is relative. He is fighting that war with everything he has.

ROBERT M. PIRSIG, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships. Some travel into the mountains accompanied by experienced guides who know the best and least dangerous routes by which they arrive at their destination. Still others, inexperienced and untrusting, attempt to make their own routes. Few of these are successful, but occasionally some, by sheer will and luck and grace, do make it. Once there they become more aware than any of the others that there's no single or fixed number of routes. There are as many routes as there are individual souls.

ROBERT M. PIRSIG, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance