Indeed, one of the most striking features of mythologies everywhere is their reference to mythological beginnings even of such indifferent customs as, for example, the shape of a hat, color of the border of a shawl, or a way of parting one’s hair

Joseph Campbell
Historical Atlas of World Mythology:
Volume 1: Part 1: Mythologies of the Primitive Hunters and Gatherers (1988) 9

If agents can’t communicate, how is it that people can—in spite of having such different backgrounds, thoughts, and purposes? The answer is that we overestimate how much we actually communicate.

Marvin Minsky
The Concept of Mind (1987) 6.12

There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees on single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this storm.

Walter Benjamin
“On the Concept of History” (1940) tr. Harry Zohn
quotes in Cess Nooteboom Lost Paradise

If you concoct a convincing on-line meta-personality on the Net, then that personality really IS you. With so few things around these days to loan a person identity, the palette of identities you create for yourself in the vacuum of the Net — your menu's of alternative "you's" — actually IS you. Or an isotope of you. Or a photocopy of you.

Douglas Coupland
microserfs (1996) 327

The real social function of literature, in this view, is to persuade the emotions to align themselves with the reason, and so act on the “heart,” which perhaps means not so much the pump in the chest as the primary or primitive brain.

Northrop Frye
The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (1976) 23

Consider how you are generous to future self at present self’s expense. Today, you put some money in the bank in order that sometime later you can take it out. Whenever did that future self do anything so good for you?

Marvin Minsky
The Society of Mind (1987) 5.7

perhaps what we call genius is rare because our evolution works without respect for individuals. Could any tribe or culture endure in which each individual discovered novel ways to think?

Marvin Minsky
The Society of Mind (1987) 7.10

The civilization we live in at present is a gigantic technological structure, a skyscraper almost high enough to reach the moon. It looks like a single worldwide effort, but it’s really a deadlock of rivalries; it looks very impressive, except that it has no genuine human dignity.

Northrop Frye
The Educated Imagination (1964) 155

The prevalence of the thought-cliché does more than misinform; it weakens attention, curiosity, and the critical sense. Where all is familiar, nothing arrests gliding and starts thought. And smooth progress permits any group of words, provided they are recognizable, to ‘explain’ almost any situation.

Jacques Barzun
The House of Intellect (1959) 54

About half the people on the bus are reading books and newspapers: the others are lost in rapt trances of pure being. They are presumably abandoned in their on-the-way-to-work thoughts, their what-I’ll-say-to-him-if-he-says thoughts, their dreams of how-dare-he and how-I’ll-try-to-catch-her-at-the-photocopying-machine, their reveries of when-I’-get-home-I’ll-tell-him-that. As well as the usual fantasies about sex, power, recognition, revenge.

John Lanchester
Mr Phillips (2000) 99-100