Top 40 Gilbert Ryle Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Gilbert Ryle

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

— Gilbert Ryle

3. “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

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

— Gilbert Ryle

5. “The dogma of the Ghost in the machine.”

— Gilbert Ryle

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

— Gilbert Ryle

7. “Chronicles are not explanatory of what they record.”

— Gilbert Ryle

8. “Drill dispenses with intelligence, training develops it.”

— Gilbert Ryle

9. “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.”

— Gilbert Ryle

10. “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.”

— Gilbert Ryle

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

— Gilbert Ryle

12. “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.”

— Gilbert Ryle

13. “I discover that there are other minds in understanding what other people say and do.”

— Gilbert Ryle

14. “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.”

— Gilbert Ryle

15. “But when a person has done the right thing, we cannot then say that he knew how to do the wrong thing, or that he was competent to make mistakes.”

— Gilbert Ryle

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

— Gilbert Ryle

17. “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.”

— Gilbert Ryle

18. “Roughly, execution and understanding are merely different exercises of knowledge of the tricks of the same trade.”

— Gilbert Ryle

19. “Minds are things, but different sorts of things from bodies;.”

— Gilbert Ryle

20. “The author is leading and the spectator is following, but their path is the same.”

— Gilbert Ryle

21. “The vain man does not think he is vain.”

— Gilbert Ryle

22. “For making mistakes is not an exercise of competence, nor is the commission of slips an exercise of knowledge how; it is a failure to exercise knowledge how.”

— Gilbert Ryle

23. “Overt intelligent performances are not clues to the workings of minds; they are those workings.”

— Gilbert Ryle

24. “The regress is infinite. and this reduces to absurdity the theory that for an operation to be intelligent it must be steered by a prior intellectual operation.”

— Gilbert Ryle

25. “When a boy begins to notice that he is fonder of arithmetic, or less homesick, than are most of his acquaintances he is beginning to be self-conscious, in this enlarged sense.”

— Gilbert Ryle

26. “The fact that Plato and Aristotle never mentioned them in their frequent and elaborate discussions of the nature of the soul and the springs of conduct is due not to any perverse neglect by them of notorious ingredients of daily life but to the historical circumstance that they were not acquainted with a special hypothesis the acceptance of which rests not on the discovery, but on the postulation, of these ghostly thrusts.”

— Gilbert Ryle

27. “Knowing how to apply maxims cannot be reduced to, or derived from, the acceptance of those or any other maxims.”

— Gilbert Ryle

28. “For the reason, or maxim, is inevitably a proposition of some generality. It cannot embody specifications to fit every detail of the particular state of affairs.”

— Gilbert Ryle

29. “The traditional theory of the mind has misconstrued the type-distinction between disposition and exercise into its mythical bifurcation of unwitnessable mental causes and their witnessable physical effects.”

— Gilbert Ryle

30. “Certainly there are some things which I can find out about you only, or best, through being told of them by you. The oculist has to ask his client what letters he sees with his right and left eyes and how clearly he sees them; the doctor has to ask the sufferer where the pain is and what sort of a pain it is; and the psychoanalyst has to ask his patient about his dreams and daydreams.”

— Gilbert Ryle

31. “To do something thinking what one is doing is, according to this legend, always to do two things; namely, to consider certain appropriate propositions, or prescriptions, and to put into practice what these propositions or prescriptions enjoin.”

— Gilbert Ryle

32. “For this theory is just another unsuccessful attempt to wriggle out of a perfectly mythical dilemma.”

— Gilbert Ryle

33. “Of course, to execute an operation intelligently is not exactly the same thing as to follow its execution intelligently. The agent is originating, the spectator is only contemplating.”

— Gilbert Ryle

34. “In making sense of what you say, in appreciating your jokes, in unmasking your chess-stratagems, in following your arguments and in hearing you pick holes in my arguments, I am not inferring to the workings of your mind, I am following them. Of course, I am not merely hearing the noises that you make, or merely seeing the movements that you perform. I am understanding what I hear and see. But this understanding is not inferring to occult causes.”

— Gilbert Ryle

35. “If ordinary men never report the occurrence of these acts, for all that, according to the theory, they should be encountered vastly more frequently than headaches, or feelings of boredom; if ordinary vocabulary has no non-academic names for them; if we do not know how to settle simple questions about their frequency, duration or strength, then it is fair to conclude that their existence is not asserted on empirical grounds.”

— Gilbert Ryle

36. “Nor does this understanding require a prolonged grounding in the not yet established laws of psychology. Following the moves made by a chess-player is not doing anything remotely resembling problematic psychological diagnosis.”

— Gilbert Ryle

37. “A natural counterpart to the theory that minds constitute a world other than ‘the physical world’ is the theory that there exist ways of discovering the contents of this other world which are counterparts to our ways of discovering the contents of the physical world.”

— Gilbert Ryle

38. “I must however make it clear from the start that this refutation will not invalidate the distinctions which we all quite properly draw between voluntary and involuntary actions and between strong-willed and weak-willed persons. It will, on the contrary, make clearer what is meant by ‘voluntary’ and ‘involuntary’, by ‘strong-willed’ and ‘weak-willed’, by emancipating these ideas from bondage to an absurd hypothesis.”

— Gilbert Ryle

39. “The competent critic of prose-style, experimental technique, or embroidery, must at least know how to write, experiment or sew. Whether or not he has also learned some psychology matters about as much as whether he has learned any chemistry, neurology or economics.”

— Gilbert Ryle

40. “Nor does this understanding require a prolonged grounding in the not yet established laws of psychology.”

— Gilbert Ryle

41. “The tangle of largely spurious problems, known as the problem of the Freedom of the Will, partly derives from this unconsciously stretched use of ‘voluntary’ and these consequential misapplications of different senses of ‘could’ and ‘could have helped’.”

— Gilbert Ryle