Robert Pirsig

In the summer of 1968, Robert Pirsig put his eleven-year-old son on the back of a motorcycle and rode west from Minneapolis toward the Pacific, carrying a question that had already cost him a marriage, a career, and a psychiatric hospitalization. The question was deceptively simple: What is Quality? Not quality control, not quality assurance, not the measurement of defects per thousand units—but Quality in the sense that everyone recognizes and no one can define: the thing that makes the difference between work that functions and work that lives. Pirsig followed the question past every boundary that Western philosophy had erected to contain it, discovered that Quality existed at the event where subject met object before analysis had time to intervene and sort the experience into categories, and recorded the pursuit in a book that became the best-selling philosophy text of all