43 Quotes by Julian Jaynes

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

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

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.

There is no such thing as a complete consciousness.

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

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

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.

Memory is the medium of the must-have-been.

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