"A person obsessed with the need to be happy will never be so. The obsession is the obstruction. He does not really seek happiness, rather he seeks for a condition which matches his personal idea regarding the nature of happiness. But happiness is not a mere idea, for one idea will always have competition from another idea. The is why the unhappy man chases for ever from one attraction to another. Happiness will come when he stops chasing, that is, when he stops thinking that an idea about happiness is the same as happiness. A man enjoying the sunshine does so without analysing it."

"The delusion of having wisdom creates the dangerous delusion of having power, leading to disaster."

"Self-righteousness loves to pounce on an evil which by sheer accident is not its particular evil."

"Mental silence is the perfect response to a challenge."

"Worried thought prevents practical thought which could prevent worried thought."

"Mental sickness has set up a system by which it never loses. No matter what you do and no matter what the results are, you will win an ego-victory. That means that when you send your desires out into the world: 1. You will get what you want, or 2. You won't get what you want. Of you get what you want, the pseudo-nature says, "I have at last been given what I so richly deserve," and the sickness feels affirmed. If you don't get what you want, you feel sorry for yourself. You still feel affirmed because you get a feeling, and that's all that neurosis wants is a feeling."

"When we associate with others we really associate with ourselves. We like or dislike in others whatever we like or dislike in ourselves."

"The power of fantasy is so strong that people think they are having a good time when they are merely wasting money."

"If you hand a man a lemon and tell him that its sourness lies outside the lemon, he will think you are joking. Yet, with a perfectly straight face, that same man will tell you that his sour life is caused by external events. When will man learn that he is the cause of his own feelings for either happiness or anxiety?"

"Truth does not hurt, rather, it is our resistance to its message that causes pain."

"Turning to God, Truth, Reality, simply means to let go, even fearfully at first, of our self-centered ideas."

"You are not responsible for anyone who stubbornly chooses to ruin his own life."

"Calm on the listening ear of night Come Heaven’s melodious strains, Where wild Judea stretches far Her silver-mantled plains."

"Death is a stage in human progress, to be passed as we would pass from childhood to youth, or from youth to manhood, and with the same consciousness of an everlasting nature."

"It came upon the midnight clear, That glorious song of old, From Angels bending near the earth To touch their harps of gold; "Peace on the earth, good will to man From Heaven’s all gracious King." The world in solemn stillness lay To hear the angels sing."

"For lo! the days are hastening on, By prophet-bards foretold, When with the ever-circling years, Comes round the age of gold; When Peace shall over all the earth Its ancient splendors fling And the whole world send back the song Which now the angels sing."

"The very reason we need logic at all is because most reasoning is not conscious at all."

"Darwin was convinced that language was the prerequisite for "long trains of thought," and this claim has been differently supported by several recent theorists, especially Julian Jaynes (1976) and Howard Margolis (1987)."

"I therefore believe that these and many other movements of our time are in the great long picture of our civilizations related to the loss of an earlier organization of human natures. They are attempts to return to what is no longer there, like poets to their inexistent Muses, and as such they are characteristic of these transitional millennia in which we are imbedded."

"The changes in the Catholic Church since Vatican II can certainly be scanned in terms of this long retreat from the sacred which has followed the inception of consciousness into the human species."

"If we would understand the Scientific Revolution correctly, we should always remember that its most powerful impetus was the unremitting search for hidden divinity. As such, it is a direct descendant of the breakdown of the bicameral mind."

"I am emphasizing individuals set apartfrom others as ill, because, according to our theory, we could say that before the second millennium B.C., everyone was schizophrenic."

"We know too much to command ourselves very far."

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

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

"The vestiges of the bicameral mind do not exist in any empty psychological space."

"Idolatry is still a socially cohesive force - its original function."

"Every god is a jealous god after the breakdown of the bicameral mind."

"Behavior now must be changed from within the new consciousness rather than from Mosaic laws carving behavior from without. Sin and desire are now within conscious desire and conscious contrition, rather than in the external behaviors of the decalogue and the penances of temple sacrifice and community punishment. The divine kingdom to be regained is psychological not physical. It is metaphorical not literal. It is "within" not in extenso."

"The mind is still haunted with its old unconscious ways; it broods on lost authorities; and the yearning, the deep and hollowing yearning for divine volition and service is with us still."

"The importance of writing in the breakdown of the bicameral voices is tremendously important. What had to be spoken is now silent and carved upon a stone to be taken in visually."

"Paradise Lost, A further observation could be made upon the story of the Fall and how it is possible to look upon it as a myth of the breakdown of the bicameral mind."

"There is no such thing as a complete consciousness."

"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."

"Poetry, from describing external events objectively, is becoming subjectified into a poetry of personal conscious expression."

"The legend of the parting of the Red Sea probably refers to tidal changes in the Sea of Reeds related to the Thera eruption."

"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."

"This breakdown in the bicameral mind in what is called the Intermediate Period is reminiscent at least of those periodic breakdowns of Mayan civilizations when all authority suddenly collapsed, and the population melted back into tribal living in the jungles."

"Reading in the third millennium B.C. may therefore have been a matter of hearing the cuneiform, that is, hallucinating the speech from looking at its picture symbols, rather than visual reading of syllables in our sense."

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

"The king dead is a living god."

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

"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."

"The bicameral mind with its controlling gods was evolved as a final stage of the evolution of language. And in this development lies the origin of civilization."

"The language of men was involved with only one hemisphere in order to leave the other free for the language of the gods."