Quality is not an easy thing to define, you can’t point at something and say, “that’s a quality”, there’s no thing that represents quality, like how you could say a compass would represent the word “direction”.

When pushed, we generally talk about quality products, usually high end cars like Porsche, Mercedes or Audi. We think of these as quality products because people are willing to pay large amounts for them. Their customers like the product enough to part with their hard earned cash.

However, If you agree with the agile manifesto, then "working software is the primary measure of progress", I think that gives the "zen-like sentence" you're talking about.

To help make it easier to understand, you can break down "working software" into two parts:

1. Objective, from a craftsmanship perspective, you can measure code coverage, performance and bugs.

2. Subjective, from a customer perspective, Does it meet their expectations? Is it useful, and secure? What are they comparing it to?

Hopefully you'll find this is easier to use than another pyramid.