Quotes from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“O, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of it all! A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet is nothing at all - what is it?
And where did it come from?
And why?”
― Julian Jaynes, quote from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“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, quote from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“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, quote from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“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, quote from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“No one is moral among the god-controlled puppets of the Iliad. Good and evil do not exist.”
― Julian Jaynes, quote from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“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, quote from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“We are thus conscious less of the time than we think, because we cannot be conscious of when we are not conscious.”
― Julian Jaynes, quote from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“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, quote from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“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, quote from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“Alfred Russel Wallace, the codiscoverer of the theory of natural selection. Following their twin announcements of the theory in 1858, both Darwin and Wallace struggled like Laocoöns with the serpentine problem of human evolution and its encoiling difficulty of consciousness. But where Darwin clouded the problem with his own naivete, seeing only continuity in evolution, Wallace could not do so.”
― Julian Jaynes, quote from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“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. How simple that is to say; how difficult to appreciate! It is like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it. The flashlight, since there is light in whatever direction it turns, would have to conclude that there is light everywhere. And so consciousness can seem to pervade all mentality when actually it does not.”
― Julian Jaynes, quote from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“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, quote from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“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, quote from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“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, quote from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“Memory is the medium of the must-have-been.”
― Julian Jaynes, quote from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“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, quote from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“Language too is a brake upon social change.”
― Julian Jaynes, quote from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“Courtiers in some of their inscriptions referring to the king say, “I did what his ka loved” or “I did that which his ka approved,”
― Julian Jaynes, quote from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“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, quote from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“movements were commanded by hallucinations which in certain periods could be not only irrational but downright punishing—”
― Julian Jaynes, quote from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“Osiris, to go directly to the important part of this, was not a "dying god," not "life caught in the spell of death," or "a dead god," as modern interpreters have said. He was the hallucinated voice of a dead king whose admonitions could still carry weight. And since he could still be heard, there is no paradox in the fact that the body from which the voice once came should be mummified, with all the equipment of the tomb providing life's necessities: food, drink, slaves, women, the lot. There was no mysterious power that emanated from him; simply his remembered voice which appeared in hallucination to those who had known him and which could admonish or suggest even as it has before he stopped moving and breathing. And that various natural phenomena such as the whispering of waves could act as the cue for such hallucinations accounts for the belief that Osiris, or the king whose body has ceased to move and is in his mummy cloths, continues to control the flooding of the Nile. Further, the relationship between Horus and Osiris, 'embodied' in each new king and his dead father forever, can only be understood as the assimilation of an hallucinated advising voice into the king's own voice, which then would be repeated with the next generation.”
― Julian Jaynes, quote from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“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, quote from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“CIVILIZATION is the art of living in towns of such size that everyone does not know everyone else.”
― Julian Jaynes, quote from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“Signal learning (or classical or Pavlovian conditioning) is the simplest example [of leaning without consciousness]. If a light signal immediately followed by a puff of air through a rubber tube is directed at a person's eye about ten times, the eyelid, which previously blinked only to the puff of air, will begin to blink to the light signal alone, and this becomes more and more frequent as trials proceed. Subjects who have undergone this well-known procedure of signal learning report that it has no conscious component whatever. Indeed, consciousness, in this example the intrusion of voluntary eye blinks to try to assist the signal learning, blocks it from occurring.”
― Julian Jaynes, quote from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

About the author

Popular quotes

“Come on. We gotta let this baby go and get some pictures.”
― Michelle Leighton, quote from Fragile

“If you forget your lines, you had better mumble with conviction.”
― Connie Brockway, quote from The Bridal Season

“It's the wife's duty, isn't it, to be submissive to her husband?" Christina asked.
"It is," Lyon answered. His hands moved to the fastenings on her dress. "Oh, yes, it definitely is."
"Then I shall be submissive, Lyon," Christina announced. "When it suits me.”
― Julie Garwood, quote from The Lion's Lady

“Не знаю, как другие женщины, а моя жена так сотворена, что даже если она занималась этим днем и продолжила ночью, и так день за днем, ей все будет мало. После встречи с любовником проделать то же самое с ненавистным мужем должно быть невыносимой пыткой, но она - исключение. Даже, если я ей противен, её плоть не может мне отказать. Как бы ни пыталась она меня отвергнуть, вожделение возьмет верх, и она подчинится ему с еще большим самозабвением. Я забыл, что именно это делает шлюху шлюхой...”
― Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, quote from The Key

“من آمن بعقله أغناه عن كل شيء.”
― Naguib Mahfouz, quote from The Journey of Ibn Fattouma

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.