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The mind is its own place and in his inner life each of us lives the life of a ghostly Robinson Crusoe. People can see, hear and jolt one another’s bodies, but they are irremediably blind and deaf to the workings of one another’s minds and inoperative upon them.

— Gilbert Ryle The Concept of Mind (1949)

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More quotes by Gilbert Ryle

Myths often do a lot of theoretical good, while they are still new.

The Concept of Mind (1949)

To see is one thing; to picture or visualise is another. A person can see things, only when his eyes are open, and when his surroundings are illuminated; but he can have pictures in his mind’s eye, when his eyes are shut and when the world is dark.

The Concept of Mind (1949)

A myth is, of course, not a fairy story. It is the presentation of facts belonging to one category in the idioms appropriate to another. To explode a myth is accordingly not to deny the facts but to re-allocate them.

The Concept of Mind (1949)

It is of first-rate importance to notice from the start that stupidity is not the same thing, or the same sort of thing, as ignorance. There is no incompatibility between being well-informed and being silly, and a person who has a good nose for arguments or jokes may have a bad head for facts.

The Concept of Mind (1949)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Gilbert Ryle (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.