Cave Paintings Quotes

• If you look at Paleolithic cave paintings, you see how people were depicted inside nature, not outside it. It was a kind of dream time. That's what I'm exploring.

  Gregory Colbert

  Dream, People, Looks

  "Peerless on the Pier". Town & Country, March 2005.

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• Stories were primarily verbal to begin with. Before there were cave paintings, stories were told over generations. We tell each other thousands of stories in the course of everyday life.

  David Massengill

  Writing, Everyday, Generations

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• The most remarkable discovery made by scientists is science itself. The discovery must be compared in importance with the invention of cave-painting and of writing. Like these earlier human creations, science is an attempt to control our surroundings by entering into them and understanding them from inside. And like them, science has surely made a critical step in human development which cannot be reversed. We cannot conceive a future society without science.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Writing, Science, Discovery

  "The Creative Process". Scientific American 199:59, September 1958.

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• Modern language must be older than the cave paintings and cave engravings and cave sculptures and dance steps in the soft clay in the caves in Western Europe, in the Aurignacian Period some 35,000 years ago, or earlier. I can't believe they did all those things and didn't also have a modern language.

  Murray Gell-Mann

  Motivation, Believe, Inspiration

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• We are so fortunate, as Australians, to have among us the oldest continuing cultures in human history. Cultures that link our nation with deepest antiquity. We have Aboriginal rock art in the Kimberley that is as ancient as the great Palaeolithic cave paintings at Altamira and Lascaux in Europe.

  Kevin Rudd

  Art, Rocks, Europe

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• That was the real secret of the Tarahumara: they'd never forgotten what it felt like to love running. They remembered that running was mankind's first fine art, our original act of inspired creation. Way before we were scratching pictures on caves or beating rhythms on hollow trees, we were perfecting the art of combining our breath and mind and muscles into fluid self-propulsion over wild terrain. And when our ancestors finally did make their first cave paintings, what were the first designs? A downward slash, lightning bolts through the bottom and middle-behold, the Running Man.

  Christopher McDougall

  Running, Art, Real

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• The need to make music, and to listen to it, is universally expressed by human beings. I cannot imagine, even in our most primitive times, the emergence of talented painters to make cave paintings without there having been, near at hand, equally creative people making song. It is, like speech, a dominant aspect of human biology.

  Lewis Thomas

  Song, Hands, People

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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• How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn't, the wolves and blizzards would be at one's throat all the sooner.

  David Mitchell

  Writing, Winter, Would Be

  David Mitchell (2008). “Cloud Atlas”, p.83, Hachette UK

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• She didn't have words for what Levi was. He was a cave painting. He was The Red Ballon. She lifted her heels and pulled him forward until his face was so close, she could look at only one of his eyes at a time. "You're magic," she said.

  Rainbow Rowell

  Eye, Magic, Caves

  Rainbow Rowell (2016). “The Rainbow Rowell Collection: Eleanor & Park, Fangirl, Landline, and Carry On”, p.666, St. Martin's Griffin

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• Chris Ofili's suave, stippled, visually tricked-out paintings of the nineties, with their allover fields of shimmering dots and clumps of dung, are like cave paintings of modern life. They crackle with optical cockiness, love, and massive amounts of painterly mojo.

  Jerry Saltz

  Caves, Suave, Mojo

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