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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.

— 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)

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.

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.