But the ones who go posing as moralists are the worst. Cost-free morals. Full of great ways for others to improve without any expense to themselves. There's an ego thing in there, too. They use the morals to make someone else look inferior, and that way look better themselves. It doesn't matter what the moral code is -- religious morals, political morals, racist morals, capitalist morals, feminist morals, hippie morals -- they're all the same. The moral codes change but the meanness and the egotism stay the same.

— Robert M. Pirsig

But until then, and right now, the sun is bright, the air is cool, my head is clear, there’s a whole day ahead of us, we’re almost to the mountains, it’s a good day to be alive. It’s this thinner air that does it. You always feel like this when you start getting into higher altitudes.

— Robert M. Pirsig

Can I have a motorcycle when I get old enough?"" If you take care of it."" What do you have to do?""Lots of things. You've been watching me."" Will you show me all of them?"" Sure."" Is it hard?"" Not if you have the right attitudes. It's having the right attitudes that's hard."" Oh." After a while I see he is sitting down again. Then he says, "Dad?"" What?"" Will I have the right attitudes?"" I think so," I say. "I don't think that will be any problem at all.

— Robert M. Pirsig

Care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing. A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who’s bound to have some characteristic of quality.

— Robert M. Pirsig

Coastal people never really know what the ocean symbolizes to landlocked inland people—what a great distant dream it is, present but unseen in the deepest levels of subconsciousness, and when they arrive at the ocean and the conscious images are compared with the subconscious dream there is a sense of defeat at having come so far to be so stopped by the mystery that can never be fathomed. The source of it all.

— Robert M. Pirsig

Dad?"" What?" A small bird rises from a tree in front of us." What should I be when I grow up?" The bird disappears over a far ridge. I don't know what to say. "Honest," I finally say.

— Robert M. Pirsig

Definitions are the foundation of reason. You can’t reason without them.

— Robert M. Pirsig

During periods of root expansion things have always looked as confused and topsy-turvy and purposeless as they do now. The whole Renaissance is supposed to have resulted from the topsy-turvy feeling caused by Columbus’ discovery of a new world. It just shook people up. The Topsy-turviness of that time is recorded everywhere. There was nothing in the flat-earth views of the Old and New Testaments that predicted it. Yet people couldn’t deny it. The only way they could assimilate it was to abandon the entire medieval outlook and enter into a new expansion of reason.

— Robert M. Pirsig

Even in the presence of others he was completely alone.

— Robert M. Pirsig

For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.

— Robert M. Pirsig