p.3 I am offering a Definition of Man... Man is the symbol-using animal... The aim is to get as essential a set of clauses as possible, and to meditate on each of them.

p.5 The "symbol-using animal," yes, obviously. But can we bring ourselves to realize just what that formula implies, just how overwhelmingly much of what we mean by "reality" has been built up for us through nothing but our symbol systems? ...What is our "reality" for today... but all this clutter of symbols about the past combined with whatever things we know mainly through maps, magazines, newspapers, and the like about the present? ...And however important to us is the tiny sliver of reality each of us has experienced firsthand, the whole overall "picture" is but a construct of our symbol systems... man... refuses to realize the full extent of the role played by symbolicity in his notions of reality.

p.6 when asking students to sum up the gist of a plot, I usually got the best results from dance majors, with music students a close second. Students specializing in literature or the social sciences tended to get bogged down in details.

p.6 An "ideology" is like a spirit taking up its abode in a body: it makes that body hop around in certain ways; and that same body would have hopped around in different ways had a different ideology happened to inhabit it.

p.6 I am saying in one way what Paul said in another when he told his listeners that "Faith comes before hearing."

p.16 Man is
the symbol-using (symbol-making, symbol-misusing) animal
inventor of the negative (or moralized by the negative)
separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making
goaded by the spirit of hierarchy (or moved by the sense of order)
and rotten with perfection.

p.23 not being biological organisms, machines lack the capacity for pleasure or pain (to say nothing of such subtler affective states as malice, envy, amusement, condescension, friendliness, sentimentality, embarrassment, etc., ad nauseam). [JLJ - hmmm... but a programmer can be amused and can have the machine react to situations that he finds amusing. So...]

p.23 Until, like the robots in Capek's R.U.R., men's contrivances can be made actually to ache, they cannot possibly serve as adequate models for the total human condition (that is, for a definition of "man in general").

p.28 we are the kind of animal that approaches everything through modes of thought developed by the use of symbol systems; what we don't have names for, we at least think of as "nameable"

p.29 If man is characteristically the symbol-using animal, then he should take pleasure in the use of his powers as a symbolizer, just as a bird presumably likes to fly or a fish to swim.

p.29 Even if you write a drama, for instance, simply for the satisfaction of writing a drama, you must write your drama about something... you can't make a drama without the use of some situation marked by conflict, even though you hypothetically began through a sheer love of dramatic exercise, in the course of so exercising you tend to use as your subject matter such tensions or problems as exercise yourself, or your potential audience, or mankind in general. Thereby you become variously involved in ways of "resolving" such tensions or problems... people tend to see these problems as the motivating source of your activity.

p.48 I hope the passage [quoted above from chapter One] can serve at least somewhat to suggest how fantastically much of our "Reality" could not exist for us, were it not for our profound and inveterate involvement in symbol systems.

p.49 In brief, "behavior" isn't something that you need but observe; even something so "objectively there" as behavior must be observed through one or another kind of terministic screen, that directs the attention in keeping with its nature. [JLJ - (Wikipedia) - a "terministic screen" is a set of symbols that becomes a kind of screen or grid of intelligibility through which the world makes sense to us.]

p.53 the difference between a thing and a person is that the one merely moves whereas the other acts.

p.59 one cannot be the kind of animal that can study biology except by having a distinctive way with symbol systems. [JLJ - this seems to apply to any moderately advanced subject]

p.60 In Santayana's Scepticism and Animal Faith (Chapter X, second paragraph), we are told that the realm of essence is "the sum of mentionable objects, of terms about which, or in which, something might be said."

p.61 the human animal confronts even the nameless and unnameable within the perspective or "psychosis" of symbolicity.

p.61 What is a philosopher necessarily doing if not attempting to translate the more-than-linguistic, less-than-linguistic, and other-than-linguistic into terms of the linguistic?

p.63 The computer... is not an animal, but an artifact. And it can't truly be said to "act." Its operations are but a complex set of sheerly physical motions. [JLJ - what if we gave it a sign-symbol system of relevance equivalent to that of an experienced man? We tell it how to translate the signs and symbols it perceives into oriented exploratory actions that help it to understand its world and develop an adaptive capacity which lets it maneuver. Is *this* system now intelligent?]

p.67 When we read a sentence, we are wholly "unconscious" of all the neural processes involved in our hearing and understanding of that sentence. Indeed, we must even find it hard to understand how the simplest sentence "makes sense."

p.70 When emerging from infancy into linguistic articulacy, a child "unconsciously learns the rules" of his language's particular grammar and syntax, though these "rules" may never have been systematically formulated. If the rules were never formulated, when speaking his language he will necessarily exemplify these rules while being "unconscious" of them, as regards the grammarian's particular kind of explicit consciousness. [JLJ - perhaps this also applies to learning how to play a social game, such as chess]