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Robert Pirsig
(6 Sep 1928 - )
American novelist and microbiologist whose best-known work is his autobiographical Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), in which he relates his motorcycle journey across America with his eleven-year-old son, from Minneapolis west through the Dakotas, the Rockies, and on to the Pacific Coast. He includes his contemplations on life, technology, and himself.
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Science Quotes by Robert Pirsig (10 quotes)
A person filled with gumption doesn’t sit about stewing about things. He’s at the front of the train of his own awareness, watching to see what’s up the track and meeting it when it comes. That’s gumption. If you’re going to repair a motorcycle, an adequate supply of gumption is the first and most important tool. If you haven’t got that you might as well gather up all the other tools and put them away, because they won’t do you any good.
— Robert Pirsig
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), 272.
An experiment is never a failure solely because it fails to achieve predicted results. 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 another.
— Robert Pirsig
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values (1974), 102.
For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses. The more you look the more you see.
— Robert Pirsig
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), 171.
One geometry cannot be more true than another; it can only be more convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.
— Robert Pirsig
…...
The major producer of the social chaos, the indeterminacy of thought and values that rational knowledge is supposed to eliminate, is none other than science itself.
— Robert Pirsig
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974).
The number of rational hypotheses that can explain any given phenomenon is infinite.
— Robert Pirsig
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An inquiry into Values (1974), 107.
The real purpose of scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you don’t actually know. There’s not a mechanic or scientist or technician alive who hasn’t suffered from that one so much that he’s not instinctively on guard. … If you get careless or go romanticizing scientific information, giving it a flourish here and there, Nature will soon make a complete fool out of you.
— Robert Pirsig
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An inquiry into Values (1974), 100-101.
The way to solve the conflict between human values and technological needs is not to run away from technology, that’s impossible. The way to resolve the conflict is to break down the barriers of dualistic thought that prevent a real understanding of what technology is—not an exploitation of nature, but a fusion of nature and the human spirit into a new kind of creation that transcends both.
— Robert Pirsig
In 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 Pirsig
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), 251.
When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion.
— Robert Pirsig
As quoted by Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion (2006, 2008), Preface, 28.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
