“Philosophy is the replacement of category-habits by category-disciplines.”

The dogma of the Ghost in the Machine, maintains that there exist both bodies and minds; that there occur physical processes and mental processes; that there are mechanical causes of corporeal movements and mental causes of corporeal movements.

Man need not be degraded to a machine by being denied to be a ghost in a machine. He might, after all, be a sort of animal, namely, a higher mammal. There has yet to be ventured the hazardous leap to the hypothesis that perhaps he is a man.

To explode a myth is accordingly not to deny the facts but to re-allocate them.

Dreamers of dreams may be pathfinders; but they may be mere vagrants. Of those who depart from the pavements, only a few are explorers: the rest are mere jaywalkers

In searching for the self, one cannot simultaneously be the hunter and the hunted.

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.

Chronicles are not explanatory of what they record.

Man need not be degraded to a machine by being denied to be a ghost in a machine.

My today’s self perpetually slips out of any hold of it that I may try to take.

Absolute solitude is on this showing the ineluctable destiny of the soul. Only our bodies can meet.

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.

So too Plato was, in my view, a very unreliable Platonist. He was too much of a philosopher to think that anything he had said was the last word.

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

The dogma of the Ghost in the machine.

Reading across three languages is a way for me to diversify my intake as a reader, not to tunnel into certain categories or demographics.

What is meant, however, is a higher category than being: the power of maintaining being.

I recommend you dispose of anything that does not fall into one of three categories: currently in use, needed for a limited period of time, or must be kept indefinitely.

People who can’t stay tidy can be categorized into just three types: ‘the can’t throw it away type’, ‘the can’t put it back type’, and ‘the first-two-combined’ type.

The serious artist must be as open as nature. Nature does not give all of herself in a paragraph. She is rugged and not set apart into discreet categories.

Some great people are leaders and others are more lucky, in the right place at the right time. I’d put myself in the latter category. But I’d never call myself a normal designer of anything.

Voices are like fingerprints, from Cagney to Bogart. They never lost it. My voice is instrumental in categorizing me.

Depression – it falls into that small category of things like combat that, if you haven’t been in it, you can say you can imagine it all you like. But it’s truly different.