On Quality

From the author of the multimillion-copy-selling classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, an original collection of Robert Pirsig’s writings on the central theme of his thought—“quality”—featuring never-before-seen selections from his unpublished works.

“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Robert M. Pirsig wrote this unpublished line in 1962 while a patient at Downey Veteran Administration Hospital in Illinois, where he was admitted as a psychiatric patient. More than a decade before the release of the book that would make him famous, Pirsig had already caught hold of the central theme that would animate Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: Quality, a concept loosely likened to “excellence”, “rightness”, or “fitness” that Pirsig saw as kindred to the Buddhist ideas of “Dharma” or the “Tao.” As he later wrote in Zen, “Quality is Buddha”.

Though he was hounded by fans who considered him a guru, the famously private Pirsig only published two books and consented to few interviews and almost no public appearances in later decades. Yet he wrote and thought almost continually, refining his “Metaphysics of Quality” until his death in 2017.