Top 40 Julian Jaynes Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “Every god is a jealous god after the breakdown of the bicameral mind.”

— Julian Jaynes

3. “The very reason we need logic at all is because most reasoning is not conscious at all.”

— Julian Jaynes

4. “The vestiges of the bicameral mind do not exist in any empty psychological space.”

— Julian Jaynes

5. “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

6. “And as you read, you are not conscious of the letters or even of the words or even of the syntax or the sentences and punctuation, but only of their meaning. As you listen to an address, phonemes disappear into words and words into sentences and sentences disappear into what they are trying to say, into meaning. To be conscious of the elements of speech is to destroy the intention of the speech.”

— Julian Jaynes

7. “Logic is the science of the justification of conclusions we have reached by natural reasoning. My point is that, for such natural reasoning to occur, consciousness is not necessary. The very reason we need logic at all is because most reasoning is not conscious at all.”

— Julian Jaynes

8. “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

9. “Civilization is the art of living in towns of such size the everyone does not know everyone else.”

— Julian Jaynes

10. “Include the knower in the known.”

— Julian Jaynes

11. “It is by metaphor that language grows.”

— Julian Jaynes

12. “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

13. “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

14. “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

15. “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

16. “Subjective conscious mind is an analog of what is called the real world. It is built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogs of behavior in the physical world.”

— Julian Jaynes

17. “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

18. “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

19. “We can only know in the nervous system what we have known in behavior first.”

— Julian Jaynes

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

— Julian Jaynes

21. “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

22. “Memory is the medium of the must-have-been.”

— Julian Jaynes

23. “Idolatry is still a socially cohesive force – its original function.”

— Julian Jaynes

24. “We are thus conscious less of the time than we think, because we cannot be conscious of when we are not conscious.”

— Julian Jaynes

25. “Poetry, from describing external events objectively, is becoming subjectified into a poetry of personal conscious expression.”

— Julian Jaynes

26. “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

27. “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

28. “Consciousness is always open to many possibilities because it involves play. It is always an adventure.”

— Julian Jaynes

29. “One does one’s thinking before one knows what one is to think about.”

— Julian Jaynes

30. “I shall state my thesis plain. The first poets were gods. Poetry began with the bicameral mind.”

— Julian Jaynes

31. “Indeed, it is sometimes almost as if the problem had to be forgotten to be solved.”

— Julian Jaynes

32. “We are greatly in need of specific research in this area of schizophrenic experience to help us understand Mesolithic man.”

— Julian Jaynes

33. “We know to much to command ourselves very far.”

— Julian Jaynes

34. “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

35. “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

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

— 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. “Poetry begins as the divine speech of the bicameral mind. Then, as the bicameral mind breaks down, there remain prophets.”

— Julian Jaynes

39. “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

40. “The king dead is a living god.”

— Julian Jaynes

41. “There is no such thing as a complete consciousness.”

— Julian Jaynes