Top 45 Julian Jaynes Quotes
#1. As the stag pants after the waterbrooks, So pants my mind after you, O gods! My mind thirsts for gods! for living gods! When shall I come face to face with gods? - Psalm 42
Julian Jaynes
#2. All of these concrete metaphors increase enormously our powers of perception of the world about us and our understanding of it, and literally create new objects. Indeed, language is an organ of perception, not simply a means of communication.
Julian Jaynes
#3. This breakdown in the bicameral mind in what is called the Intermediate Period is reminiscent at least of those periodic breakdowns of Mayan civilizations when all authority suddenly collapsed, and the population melted back into tribal living in the jungles.
Julian Jaynes
#4. 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
#5. What was then an augury for direction of action among the ruins of an archaic mentality is now the search for an innocence of certainty among the mythologies of facts.
Julian Jaynes
#6. 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. And this is possible only in a spatial metaphor of time.
Julian Jaynes
#8. One does one's thinking before one knows what one is to think about.
Julian Jaynes
#9. Indeed, it is sometimes almost as if the problem had to be forgotten to be solved.
Julian Jaynes
#10. Reading in the third millennium B.C. may therefore have been a matter of hearing the cuneiform, that is, hallucinating the speech from looking at its picture symbols, rather than visual reading of syllables in our sense.
Julian Jaynes
#11. Cases they arrived suddenly, without any effort on my part . . . they liked especially to make their appearance while
Julian Jaynes
#12. No one is moral among the god-controlled puppets of the _Iliad_. Good and evil do not exist.
Julian Jaynes
#14. We know to much to command ourselves very far.
Julian Jaynes
#15. 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
#16. The vestiges of the bicameral mind do not exist in any empty psychological space.
Julian Jaynes
#17. Poetry begins as the divine speech of the bicameral mind. Then, as the bicameral mind breaks down, there remain prophets.
Julian Jaynes
#18. History does not move by leaps into unrelated novelty, but rather by the selective emphasis of aspects of its own immediate past.
Julian Jaynes
#19. Consciousness is always open to many possibilities because it involves play. It is always an adventure.
Julian Jaynes
#20. For if consciousness is based on language, then it follows that it is of much more recent origin than has been heretofore supposed. Consciousness come after language! The implications of such a position are extremely serious.
Julian Jaynes
#21. The unlocatable location of things thought about
Julian Jaynes
#22. I shall state my thesis plain. The first poets were gods. Poetry began with the bicameral mind.
Julian Jaynes
#23. Thinking, then, is not conscious. Rather, it is an automatic process following a struction and the materials on which the struction is to operate.
Julian Jaynes
#24. The importance of writing in the breakdown of the bicameral voices is tremendously important. What had to be spoken is now silent and carved upon a stone to be taken in visually.
Julian Jaynes
#25. Idolatry is still a socially cohesive force - its original function.
Julian Jaynes
#26. As a boy when his mother told him to listen to the voice inside him to help him tell the difference between right and wrong, nothing happened. He concluded that "either I was too wicked to have a conscience or too good to need one".
Julian Jaynes
#27. The lexicon of language, then, is a finite set of terms that by metaphor is able to stretch out over an infinite set of circumstances, even to creating new circumstances thereby.
Julian Jaynes
#28. If we would understand the Scientific Revolution correctly, we should always remember that its most powerful impetus was the unremitting search for hidden divinity. As such, it is a direct descendant of the breakdown of the bicameral mind.
Julian Jaynes
#29. Poetry, from describing external events objectively, is becoming subjectified into a poetry of personal conscious expression.
Julian Jaynes
#31. 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
#32. He felt the evidence showed that some metaphysical force had directed evolution at three different points: the beginning of life, the beginning of consciousness, and the beginning of civilized culture.
Julian Jaynes
#34. Civilization is the art of living in towns of such size the everyone does not know everyone else.
Julian Jaynes
#35. The mind is still haunted with its old unconscious ways; it broods on lost authorities; and the yearning, the deep and hollowing yearning for divine volition and service is with us still.
Julian Jaynes
#36. The very reason we need logic at all is because most reasoning is not conscious at all.
Julian Jaynes
#37. The changes in the Catholic Church since Vatican II can certainly be scanned in terms of this long retreat from the sacred which has followed the inception of consciousness into the human species.
Julian Jaynes
#38. We are thus conscious less of the time than we think, because we cannot be conscious of when we are not conscious.
Julian Jaynes
#39. There is no such thing as a complete consciousness.
Julian Jaynes
#40. Our search for certainty rests in our attempts at understanding the history of all individual selves and all civilizations. Beyond that, there is only awe.
Julian Jaynes
#41. Abstract words are ancient coins whose concrete images in the give and take of talk have worn away with use.
Julian Jaynes
#42. Indeed I have begun in this fashion, and place great importance on this opening chapter, for unless you are here convinced that a civilization without consciousness is possible, you will find the discussion that follows unconvincing and paradoxical.
Julian Jaynes
#43. We can only know in the nervous system what we have known in behavior first.
Julian Jaynes
#44. Words have meaning, not life or persons or the universe itself," he said. "Our search for certainty rests in our attempts at understanding the history of all individual selves and all civilizations. Beyond that, there is only awe." From a Life Magazine interview in 1988.
Julian Jaynes
#45. We are greatly in need of specific research in this area of schizophrenic experience to help us understand Mesolithic man.
Julian Jaynes
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
