Robert M. Pirsig Quotes

Words spoken about the Way have no taste. When looked at, there's not enough to see. When listened to, there's not enough to hear. When used, it is never exhausted.

The Way is ever nameless.

What I'm dealing with is so vast and great that it can't be called the truth. It's above the truth.

When I'm asked to define God, I'm almost wordless.

I wished I could explain it to those I loved, my mother, to Japhy, but there just weren't any words to describe the nothingness and purity of it. "Is there a certain and definite teaching to be given to all living creatures?" was the question probably asked to beetle browed snowy Dipankara, and his answer was the roaring silence of the diamond.

Tao is beyond words and beyond things. It is not expressed either in word or in silence. Where there is no longer word or silence Tao is apprehended.

No statement about God is simply, literally true. God is far more than can be measured, described, defined in ordinary language, or pinned down to any particular happening.

One cannot long remain so absorbed in contemplation of emptiness without being increasingly attracted to it. In vain, one bestows on it the name of infinity; this does not change its nature.

God is best known in not knowing him.

In the past some of the most influential Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians, such as Maimonides, Aquinas and Ibn Sina, made it clear that it was very difficult to speak about God, because when we confront the ultimate, we are at the end of what words or thoughts can do.

Although sometimes the morbid is also the transcendent, the transcendent cannot be reduced to the morbid.

The supreme function of reason is to show man that some things are beyond reason.

When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.

Happiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalised.

If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.

God's inexplicable. God is beyond the everything. And yet we can't cease to blather about it.

I think people hear the words 'transcendental meditation' and 'paganism,' and that's almost worse because it's real. Those are real things. Those are absolute energies. Satanism is like Halloween. Transcendental meditation and having a realization of how we really are - whether we want to be or not - we live in a pagan culture.

A God that can be understood is no God. Who can explain the Infinite in words?

And immediately Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: The sun-comprehending glass, And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky.

The highest cannot be spoken; it can only be acted.

If the Way is made clear, it is not the Way.

Only when all images of Earth are hushed and the clamor of the senses be stilled, and the soul has passed beyond thought of self, can the eternal wisdom be revealed to the mystic who seeks that highest communion with the unseen.

Transcendence is something between a metaphor and a miracle.

By and by... there are more and more gaps of silence. Through those gaps, windows will open to the divine.