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:
“It passes, and we stay:
A quality of loss
Affecting our content,
As trade had suddenly encroached
Upon a sacrament.”
—Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)
“The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes.
‘Tis mightiest in the mightiest. It becomes
The thronèd monarch better than his crown.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“The quality of a marriage is proven by its ability to tolerate an occasional “exception.””
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)