# Lila - Author: [Robert M. Pirsig](https://www.leafyquotes.com/robert-m-pirsig.md) - Quotes: 10 - Book page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/robert-m-pirsig/lila ## Quotes > Good is a noun rather than an adjective. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/robert-m-pirsig/lila/good-is-a-noun.md) > The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that all energy systems run down like a clock and never rewind themselves. But life not only 'runs up,' converting low energy sea-water, sunlight and air into high-energy chemicals, it keeps multiplying itself into more and better clocks that keep 'running up' faster and faster. Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organize themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive? If we leave a chemistry professor out on a rock in the sun long enough the forces of nature will convert him into simple compounds of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, and small amounts of other minerals. It's a one-way reaction. No matter what kind of chemistry professor we use and no matter what process we use we can't turn these compounds back into a chemistry professor. Chemistry professors are unstable mixtures of predominantly unstable compounds which, in the exclusive presence of the sun's heat, decay irreversibly into simpler organic and inorganic compounds. That's a scientific fact. The question is: Then why does nature reverse this process? What on earth causes the inorganic compounds to go the other way? It isn't the sun's energy. We just saw what the sun's energy did. It has to be something else. What is it? [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/robert-m-pirsig/lila/the-second-law.md) > Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/robert-m-pirsig/lila/quality-is-a-direct.md) > Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/robert-m-pirsig/lila/sanity-is-not.md) > The most moral activity of all is the creation of space for life to move around. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/robert-m-pirsig/lila/the-most-moral.md) > Metaphysics is names about reality. Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty-thousand-page menu and no food. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/robert-m-pirsig/lila/metaphysics-is-names.md) > The world comes to us in an endless stream of puzzle pieces that we would like to think all fit together somehow, but that in fact never do. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/robert-m-pirsig/lila/the-world-comes.md) > Any person of any philosophic persuasion who sits on a hot stove will verify without any intellectual argument whatsoever that he is in an undeniably low-quality situation: that the value of his predicament is negative. This low quality is not just a vague, woolly-headed, crypto-religious, metaphysical abstraction. It is an experience. It is not a judgment about an experience. It is not a description of experience. The value itself is an experience. As such it is completely predictable. It is verifiable by anyone who cares to do so. It is reproducible. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/robert-m-pirsig/lila/any-person-of-any.md) > The thing to understand is that if you are going to reform society you don't start with cops. And if you are going to reform intellect you don't start with psychiatrists. If you don't like our present social system or intellectual system the best thing you can do with either cops or psychiatrists is stay out of their way. You leave them till last. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/robert-m-pirsig/lila/the-thing-to-understand.md) > Between the subject and the object lies the value. This Value is more immediate, more directly sensed than any 'self' or any 'object' to which it may be later assigned. It is more real than the stove. Whether the stove is the cause of the low quality or whether possibly something else is the cause is not yet absolutely certain. But that the quality is low is absolutely certain. It is the primary empirical reality from which such things as stoves and heat and oaths and self are later intellectually constructed. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/robert-m-pirsig/lila/between-the-subject.md)