Julian Jaynes Short Quotes

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There is no such thing as a complete consciousness.

Julian Jaynes
One does one's thinking before one knows what one is to think about.

Julian Jaynes
Idolatry is still a socially cohesive force - its original function.

Julian Jaynes
Every god is a jealous god after the breakdown of the bicameral mind.

Julian Jaynes
We can only know in the nervous system what we have known in behavior first.

Julian Jaynes
The vestiges of the bicameral mind do not exist in any empty psychological space.

Julian Jaynes
Indeed, it is sometimes almost as if the problem had to be forgotten to be solved.

Julian Jaynes
The very reason we need logic at all is because most reasoning is not conscious at all.

Julian Jaynes
No one is moral among the god-controlled puppets of the _Iliad_. Good and evil do not exist.

Julian Jaynes
I shall state my thesis plain. The first poets were gods. Poetry began with the bicameral mind.

Julian Jaynes
Civilization is the art of living in towns of such size that everyone does not know everyone else.

Julian Jaynes
Abstract words are ancient coins whose concrete images in the give and take of talk have worn away with use.

Julian Jaynes
The language of men was involved with only one hemisphere in order to leave the other free for the language of the gods.

Julian Jaynes
Poetry begins as the divine speech of the bicameral mind. Then, as the bicameral mind breaks down, there remain prophets.

Julian Jaynes
We are greatly in need of specific research in this area of schizophrenic experience to help us understand Mesolithic man.

Julian Jaynes
The legend of the parting of the Red Sea probably refers to tidal changes in the Sea of Reeds related to the Thera eruption.

Julian Jaynes
Poetry, from describing external events objectively, is becoming subjectified into a poetry of personal conscious expression.

Julian Jaynes
History does not move by leaps into unrelated novelty, but rather by the selective emphasis of aspects of its own immediate past.

Julian Jaynes
These esoteric poses of philosophy and even the paper theories of behaviorists are mere subterfuges to avoid the material we are talking about.

Julian Jaynes
Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of.

Julian Jaynes
The bicameral mind with its controlling gods was evolved as a final stage of the evolution of language. And in this development lies the origin of civilization.

Julian Jaynes
The Trojan War was directed by hallucinations. And the soldiers who were so directed were not at all like us. They were noble automatons who knew not what they did.

Julian Jaynes
Our sense of justice depends on our sense of time. Justice is a phenomenon only of consciousness, because time spread out in a spatial succession is its very essence.

Julian Jaynes
Paradise Lost, A further observation could be made upon the story of the Fall and how it is possible to look upon it as a myth of the breakdown of the bicameral mind.

Julian Jaynes
I am emphasizing individuals set apartfrom others as ill, because, according to our theory, we could say that before the second millennium B. C., everyone was schizophrenic.

Julian Jaynes