Saturday, September 17, 2011

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance part 2

"Quality... you now what it is, yet you don't know what it is.  But that's self-contradictory.  But some things are better than others, that is, they have more quality.  But when you try to say what Quality is apart from the things that have it, it all goes poof!  There's nothing to talk about.  But if you can't say what Quality is, how do you know what it is, or how do you know that it even exists?" - Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Is he right?  Is defining Quality really that hard?
I can provide many examples of why one thing is better than another, but is that quality or opinion?  Maybe quality is in the eye of the beholder.  This would make sense because then we would all define it differently.  There wouldn't be one definition of quality.  You might think that one movie is better than another.  I might disagree completely.
If that is the case then the definition of quality would be something like this.  Quality is your opinion of how much better one object/idea is than another. 

How would you define quality?

1 comment:

  1. Quality is in the eye of the beholder. The quality of something is very subjective. SInce human beings can never completely be objective about something because every human being has a background effecting their opinion. Therefore I think that you can not really define quality for everyone. The definition of quality changes from one person to another. I would define quality as a characteristic at its best in one's opinion.

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