Primitive Man Quotes

• The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the power of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the rank of devoutly religious men.

  Albert Einstein

  Beautiful, Death, God

  Quoted in Philipp Frank Einstein: His Life and Times (1947), ch.12, section 5.

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• When primitive man heard thunder or saw the lightning, he could not account for either, and therefore concluded that back of them must be a force greater than himself. Similarly he saw a supernatural force in the rain, and in the various other changes in nature.

  Emma Goldman

  Rain, Men, Supernatural Forces

  Emma Goldman (2015). “Anarchism and Other Essays”, p.97, Library of Alexandria

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• The consideration of human suffering is not one which enters into the calculations of primitive man.

  James G. Frazer

  Men, Suffering, Consideration

  "The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion". Book by James G. Frazer, 1890.

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• Sculpture is, in the twentieth century, a wide field of experience, with many facets of symbol and material and individual calligraphy. But in all these varied and exciting extensions of our experience we always come back tot the fact that we are human beings of such and such a size, biologically the same as primitive man, and that it is through drawing and observing, or observing and drawing, that we equate our bodies with our landscape.

  Barbara Hepworth

  Men, Drawing, Sculpture

  Studio International 171, p. 280, June 1966.

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• Human beings are born with the instinct to express themselves through movement. Even before he could communicate with words, primitive man was dancing to the beat of his own heart.

  Bob Fosse

  Dance, Heart, Men

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• We are primitive men; we taboo what we desire and need. How did the denying of love come to be associated with the idea of morality.

  Christina Stead

  Love, Art, Men

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• Just as primitive man believed himself to stand face to face with demons and believed that could he but know their names he would become their master, so is contemporary man faced by this incomprehensible, which disorders his calculations.

  Karl Jaspers

  Men, Thinking, Names

  "Man in the Modern Age (Routledge Revivals)".

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• Modern man uses ideas and persuasion to achieve his goals; primitive man uses guns and brute force to achieve his goals! Moral and clever people choose the first method; immoral and stupid people choose the second method!

  Mehmet Murat Ildan

  Clever, Stupid, Gun

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• If we can combine our knowledge of science with the wisdom of wildness, if we can nurture civilization through roots in the primitive, man's potentialities appear to be unbounded.

  Charles Lindbergh

  Men, Civilization, Roots

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• We are so accustomed to the apparently rational nature of our world that we can scarcely imagine anything happening that cannot be explained by common sense. The primitive man confronted by a shock of this kind would not doubt his sanity; he would think of fetishes, spirits or gods

  Carl Jung

  Men, Thinking, Our World

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• What is conserved in the ground? Stone, bronze, ivory, bone, sometimes pottery. Never wood objects, no fabric or skins. That completely skews our notions about primitive man.

  Pablo Picasso

  Men, Ivory, Skins

  Source: www.americansuburbx.com

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• Wherever primitive man put up a word, he believed he had made a discovery. How utterly mistaken he really was! He had touched a problem, and while supposing he had solved it, he had created and obstacle to its solution. Now, with every new knowledge we stumble over flint-like and petrified words and, in so doing, break a leg sooner than a word.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Men, Break A Leg, Discovery

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• The conception of gods originated in fear and curiosity. Primitive man, unable to understand the phenomena of nature, and harassed by them, saw in every terrifying manifestation some sinister force expressly directed against him; and as ignorance and fear are the parents of all superstition, the troubled fancy of primitive man wove the God idea.

  Emma Goldman

  Ignorance, Men, Ideas

  Emma Goldman (1915). “Mother Earth, a Monthly Magazine Devoted to the Social Science and Literature”

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• If we can combine our knowledge of science with the wisdom of wildness, if we can nurture civilization through roots in the primitive, man's potentialities appear to be unbounded, Through this evolving awareness, and his awareness of that awareness, he can emerge with the miraculous-to which we can attach what better name than 'God'? And in this merging, as long sensed by intuition but still only vaguely perceived by rationality, experience may travel without need for accompanying life.

  Charles Lindbergh

  God, Wisdom, Science

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• If we put together all that we have learned from anthropology and ethnography about primitive men and primitive society, we perceive that the first task of life is to live. Men begin with acts, not with thoughts.

  William Graham Sumner

  Life, Learning, Science

  Folkways ch. 1 (1906)

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• Financiers are great mythomaniacs, their explanations and superstitions are those of primitive men; the world is a jungle to them.They perceive acutely that they are at the dawn of economic history.

  Christina Stead

  Men, Dawn, Economic History

  Christina Stead (2012). “House of All Nations”, p.122, Open Road Media

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• By nature, by necessity itself, [primitive man] is encyclopedic, while civilized man finds himself confined in the infinitely small regions of specialization.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Knowledge, Men, Civilization

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• Labels are for the things men make, not for men. The most primitive man is too complex to be labeled.

  Rex Stout

  Men, Labels, Complexes

  Rex Stout (2010). “The Father Hunt”, p.110, Bantam

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• There can be no doubt ... of our dependence upon forces beyond our control. Primitive man was so impotent in the face of these forces that g , especially in an unfavorable natural environment, fear became a dominant attitude, and, as the old saying goes, fear created gods.

  John Dewey

  Attitude, Men, Doubt

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• Death is not regarded as a natural affair by primitive man. Death is believed to be due to the intervention of some malevolent or at least not well disposed power. Normally it should not take place. So we have all through history crude explanations of death, as e.g., the influence of the serpent, the devil, sin.

  Joseph Alexander Leighton

  Men, Devil, Influence

  Joseph Alexander Leighton (1918). “The Field of Philosophy: An Outline of Lectures on Introduction to Philosophy”

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• We are used to thinking of the Arabs as primitive men of the desert, as a donkey-like nation that neither sees nor understands what is going around it. But this is a GREAT ERROR. The Arab, like all sons of Sham, has sharp and crafty mind . . . Should time come when life of our people in Palestine imposes to a smaller or greater extent on the natives, they WILL NOT easily step aside.

  Ahad Ha'am

  Son, Men, Thinking

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• To play with baubles is our ambition, not to deal with grave questions in a spirit of serious energy. But while we are playing with baubles, with our Legislative Councils, our Simultaneous Examinations, our ingenious schemes for separating the judicial from the executive functions, - while we, I say, are finessing about trifles, the waters of the great deep are being stirred and that surging chaos of the primitive man over which our civilised societies are superimposed on a thin crust of convention, is being strangely and ominously agitated.

  Sri Aurobindo

  Ambition, Men, Play

  "New Lamps for Old". Nine articles by Sri Aurobindo in the "Indu Prakash" (a Bombay daily newspaper), December 4, 1893.

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• Most of the vices and mortal sins condemned today correspond to inclinations that were purely adaptive or at least harmless in primitive man

  Konrad Lorenz

  Men, Vices, Demise

  Konrad Lorenz (1966). “On aggressión”

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• The only information we have about the early history of the dance comes to us from the rock paintings created by primitive man tens of thousands of years ago in what is now France.

  Curt Sachs

  Dance, Men, Rocks

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• The origins of clothing are not practical. They are mystical and erotic. The primitive man in the wolf-pelt was not keeping dry; he was saying: Look what I killed. Aren't I the best?

  Katharine Hamnett

  Fashion, Men, Erotic

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