“Chronicles are not explanatory of what they record.”

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.

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.

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

The camera creates a magical transformation. It’s not enough to exist; we must chronicle that existence. …

Cosmic terror appears as an ingredient of the earliest folklore of all races and is crystallised in the most archaic ballads, chronicles, and sacred writings.

Unlike so many Dylan-writer-wannabes and phony ‘encyclopedia’ compilers, Sean Wilentz makes me feel he was in the room when he chronicles events that I participated in.

Our chronicle seems to fail us-a leaf has been torn out from nature’s record, and the succession of events is almost hidden from our eyes.

A diary need not be a dreary chronicle of one’s movements; it should aim rather at giving salient account of some particular episode, a walk, a book, a conversation.

Darwin begins by assuming life upon the earth; the Bible reveals the source of life and chronicles its creation.