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

“Such trade was not, however, a true market. There were no prices under the pressures of supply and demand, no buying and selling, and no money. It was trade in the sense of equivalences established by divine decree. There is a complete lack of reference to business profits or loss in any of the cuneiform tablets that have been so far translated.”

“Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness: Julian Jaynes's Bicameral Mind Theory Revisited”

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

“It is by metaphor that language grows.”

“The central assertion of this view, I repeat, is that each new stage of words literally created new perceptions and attentions, and such new perceptions and attentions resulted in important cultural changes which are reflected in the archaeological record.”

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