Julian Jaynes Quotes

Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual.

Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms.

Thinking about language, while thinking _in_ language, leads to puzzles and paradoxes.

The American psychologist Julian Jaynes, in a controversial study on the origin of consciousness, argued that the bicameral mind - in which one of the hemispheres becomes specialized in silent reading - is a late development in humankind's evolution, and that the process by which this function develops is still changing.

I love language. It doesn't bother me that its effects are partial. To me that is very sanity-producing. It would be weird if the effects of language were more than partial, if your whole life existed within your texts. That would be much scarier to me than language being an inadequate tool to represent.

It's as if we're higher apes who had a language faculty inserted.

Language comes first. It's not that language grows out of consciousness, if you haven't got language, you can't be conscious.

Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.

Was there a little time between the invention of language and the coming of true and false?

Language is the picture and counterpart of thought.

Language is, without a doubt, the most momentous and at the same time the most mysterious product of the human mind.

Language is generated by the intellect and generates the intellect.

Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.

Language is the chief means and index of a nation's progress.

The constructions of language, which is to say the constructions of thought, are formed within experience, not the other way around.

I hardly ever talk- words seem such a waste, and they are none of them true. No one has yet invented a language from my point of view.

The only living language is the language in which we think and have our being.

Words don't change their shape, they change their meaning, their function...They don't have a meaning of their own any more, they refer to other words that you don't know, that you've never read or heard...you've never seen their shape, but you feel...you suspect...they correspond to...an empty space inside you...or in the universe.

Reason" in language - oh, what an old deceptive female she is! I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.

Ideas do not exist separately from language.

Language does our thinking for us.

It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is. Language disguises thought.

It is impossible to disassociate language from science...To call forth a concept, a word is needed.

You need language for thought, and you need language to anticipate death. There is no abstract thought without language and no anticipation. I think the anticipation of death without language would be impossible.

We think in language. The quality of our thoughts and ideas can only be as good as the quality of our language.