Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) was an American author and professor. Pirsig was best known for his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a contemporary philosophical meditation on how to live.
CLEAR ALL
The author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance examines life's essential issues as he recounts the journey down the Hudson River in a sailboat of his philosopher-narrator Phaedrus.
A penetrating examination of how we live and how to live better. A narration of a summer motorcycle trip undertaken by a father and his son, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance becomes a personal and philosophical odyssey into fundamental questions on how to live.
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Shortly after ‘Zen’ was published, Connie Goldman talked with Robert Pirsig at his home in St. Paul, Minn. Pirsig discusses his process in writing the book, at times working four hours before he arrived for his day job writing technical manuals. Originally broadcast on July 12, 1974.
To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.
“The ultimate goal in the pursuit of excellence is enlightenment.” Robert M. Pirsig wrote this unpublished line in 1962 while a patient at Downey Veteran Administration Hospital in Illinois, where he was admitted as a psychiatric patient.
Anthony McWatt explores the philosophical ideas underlying the culture-changing 1970s blockbuster Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
This interview with Robert Prisig was done just after the publication of Lila, Robert’s 2nd book.
The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you actually don’t know.
The Seventies bestseller Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was the biggest-selling philosophy book ever. But for the reclusive author life was bitter-sweet. Here, he talks frankly about anxiety, depression, the death of his son and the road trip that inspired a classic.
Robert M. Pirsig, whose “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” a dense and discursive novel of ideas, became an unlikely publishing phenomenon in the mid-1970s and a touchstone in the waning days of the counterculture, died on Monday at his home in South Berwick, Me. He was 88.
To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.
