Quality
"Dynamic Quality cannot be defined. It can only be understood intellectually through the use of analogy."
Dan Glover, Lila's Child: An Inquiry Into Quality"Quality," or "value," as described by Pirsig, cannot be defined because it empirically precedes any intellectual construction of it, namely due to the fact that quality (as Pirsig explicitly defines it) exists always as a perceptual experience before it is ever thought of descriptively or academically. Quality is the "knife-edge" of experience, found only in the present, known or at least potentially accessible to us all. (Plato's Phaedrus, 258d). Equating it with the Tao, Pirsig postulates that Quality is the fundamental force in the universe stimulating everything from atoms to animals to evolve and incorporate ever greater levels of Quality. According to the MOQ, everything (including ideas, and matter) is a product and a result of Quality.
Read more about this topic: Pirsig's Metaphysics Of Quality
Famous quotes containing the word quality:
“Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“The best quality tea must have creases like the leathern boot of Tartar horsemen, curl like the dewlap of a mighty bullock, unfold like a mist rising out of a ravine, gleam like a lake touched by a zephyr, and be wet and soft like a fine earth newly swept by rain.”
—Lu Yu (d. 804)
“So much has already been said about Shakespeare that there doesn’t seem to be anything more to say; yet it is the quality of the spirit that it forever stimulates the spirit.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)