And when it is suggested that the inward feelings of power or inward monitions or losses of judgement are the germs out of which the divine machinery developed, I return that truth is just the reverse, that the presence of voices which had to be obeyed were the absolute prerequisite to the conscious stage of mind in which it is the self that is responsible and can debate within itself, can order and direct, and that the creation of such a self is the product of culture. In a sense, we have become our own gods.

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

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

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

It is by metaphor that language grows.

No one is moral among the god-controlled puppets of the _Iliad_. Good and evil do not exist.

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.