Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food.
Robert M. PirsigWhat I mean (and everybody else means) by the word 'quality' cannot be broken down into subjects and predicates. This is not because Quality is so mysterious but because Quality is so simple, immediate and direct.
Robert M. PirsigWhen you look directly at an insane man all you see is a reflection of your own knowledge that he's insane, which is not to see him at all.
Robert M. Pirsig(What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness).Familiarity can blind you too.
Robert M. PirsigCultures are not the source of all morals, only a limited set of morals. Cultures can be graded and judged morally according to their contribution to the evolution of life.
Robert M. PirsigWhat the Metaphysics of Quality would do is take this separate category, Quality, and show how it contains within itself both subjects and objects. The Metaphysics of Quality would show how things become enormously more coherent-fabulously more coherent-when you start with an assumption that Quality is the primary empirical reality of the world. . . . . . . but showing that, of course, was a very big job. . . .
Robert M. Pirsig