Primitive Quotes - Page 4

• In the 40,000 year time scale we're all the same people. We're all equally primitive, give or take two or three thousand years here or a hundred years there.

  Gary Snyder

  Years, Two, Giving

  Gary Snyder (1977). “The Old Ways: Six Essays”

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• Every modern male has, lying at the bottom of his psyche, a large, primitive being covered with hair down to his feet. Making contact with this Wild Man is the step the Eighties male or the Nineties male has yet to take. That bucketing-out process has yet to begin in our contemporary culture.

  Robert Bly

  Lying, Men, Hair

  Robert Bly (2015). “Iron John: A Book about Men”, p.11, Da Capo Press

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• If my university years taught me anything, it was that the smarter a woman's background, the more primitive her bedchamber

  Rowan Pelling

  Years, Taught, Backgrounds

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• By degrees we may come to know the primitive sense of the permanent objects of nature, so that the world shall be to us an open book, and every form significant of its hidden life and final cause.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Nature, Book, Knowledge

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2012). “Nature and Other Essays”, p.14, Courier Corporation

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• The civilized nations--Greece, Rome, England--have been sustained by the primitive forests which anciently rotted where they stand. They survive as long as the soil is not exhausted. Alas for human culture! little is to be expected of a nation, when the vegetable mould is exhausted, and it is compelled to make manure of the bones of its fathers. There the poet sustains himself merely by his own superfluous fat, and the philosopher comes down on his marrow-bones.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Nature, Father, Rome

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Selected Essays of Henry David Thoreau”, p.170, Simon and Schuster

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• Thus the creative genius may be at once nave and knowledgeable, being at home equally to primitive symbolism and to rigorous logic. He is both more primitive and more cultured, more destructive and more constructive, occasionally crazier and yet adamantly saner, than the average person.

  Frank X. Barron

  Home, Average, Symbolism

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• Let us shun everything, which might tend to efface the primitive lineaments of our individuality. Let us reflect that each one of us is a thought of God.

  Sophie Swetchine

  Individuality, Might

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• ... the sciences are like a beautiful river, of which the course is easy to follow, when it has acquired a certain regularity; but if one wants to go back to the source, one will find it nowhere, because it is everywhere; it is spread so much [as to be] over all the surface of the earth; it is the same if one wants to go back to the origin of the sciences, one will find only obscurity, vague ideas, vicious circles; and one loses oneself in the primitive ideas.

  Lazare Carnot

  Beautiful, Circles, Ideas

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• Our society and our organizations have learned to value masculine, 'quick-fix' traits in leaders. In a primitive society, a rural society, or even the industrial society of the early 1990s, quick fixes worked out all right. But they are less likely to work in a complex society. We need to look at long-range outcomes now. Service and patience are what can keep things running effectively today and women can contribute a lot in both of these areas.

  Estelle Ramey

  Leadership, Running, Organization

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• the recurrent drama of menstrual bleeding must have been unnerving to primitive peoples. In man, the shedding of blood is always associated with injury, disease, or death. Only the female half of humanity was seen to have the magical ability to bleed profusely and still rise phoenix-like each month from the gore.

  Estelle Ramey

  Women, Drama, Blood

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• Religion, even the most primitive and superstitious, is inevitably a beginning of culture. It is not possible without some kind of symbolic expression ... and begets dramatic gesture, dance, and chant.

  Susanne Katherina Langer

  Expression, Religion, Culture

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• Religion is like our appendix, a vestigial remnant from a primitive past. Perhaps in a few millennia the god of Abraham will invoke the same curious amusement as rain and sun gods do today. Or perhaps our god will simply be shelved along with Zeus and Jupiter. Some day. But until then, we suffer the consequences of a population that believes in the absence of evidence and, more curiously, rejects an objective reality that conflicts with beliefs easily proven false.

  Jeff Schweitzer

  Rain, Believe, Past

  "Pareidolia in Politics: The Face of Faith’s Corrupting Influence". www.huffingtonpost.com. January 26, 2015.

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• Wilderness areas are first of all a series of sanctuaries for the primitive arts of wilderness travel, especially canoeing and packing.

  Aldo Leopold

  Art, Sanctuary, Firsts

  Aldo Leopold (2013). “Aldo Leopold: A Sand County Almanac & Other Writings on Conservation and Ecology: (Library of America #238)”, p.228, Library of America

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• To preserve wild animals implies generally the creation of a forest for them to dwell in or resort to. So it is with man. A hundred years ago they sold bark in our streets peeled from our own woods. In the very aspect of those primitive and rugged trees there was, methinks, a tanning principle which hardened and consolidated the fibres of men's thoughts. Ah! already I shudder for these comparatively degenerate days of my native village, when you cannot collect a load of bark of good thickness, and we no longer produce tar and turpentine.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Animal, Men, Years

  Henry David Thoreau (1993). “Civil Disobedience, and Other Essays”, p.63, Courier Corporation

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• Look at this poet William Carlos Williams: he is primitive and native, and his roots are in raw forest and violent places; he is word-sick and place-crazy. He admires strength, but for what? Violence! This is the cult of the frontier mind.

  Edward Dahlberg

  Strength, Crazy, Roots

  Edward Dahlberg (1967). “Alms for Oblivion”, U of Minnesota Press

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• But Geology carries the day: it is like the pleasure of gambling, speculating, on first arriving, what the rocks may be; I often mentally cry out 3 to 1 Tertiary against primitive; but the latter have hitherto won all the bets.

  Charles Darwin

  Gambling, Rocks, Arriving

  Charles Darwin, Frederick Burkhardt, Sydney Smith (1985). “The Correspondence of Charles Darwin: 1821-1836”, p.232, Cambridge University Press

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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, Primitive Man, Labels

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

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• During this period (of technological confinement / [and language]) the human mind has been placed in its narrowest confines it has experienced since consciousness emerged from its Paleolithic phase. Even the most primitive tribes have a larger vision of the universe, of our place and functioning within it, a vision that extends to celestial regions of space and to interior depths of the human in a manner far exceeding the parameters of our world of technological confinement.

  Thomas Berry

  Our World, Space, Mind

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• They are Nietzsche's over-men, these primitive Albanians - something between kings and tigers.

  Henry Noel Brailsford

  Kings, Men, Albania

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• A half century from now, our grandchildren are likely to look back at the era of mass employment in the market with the same sense of utter disbelief as we look upon slavery and serfdom in former times. The very idea that a human being's worth was measured almost exclusively by his or her productive output of goods and services and material wealth will seem primitive, even barbaric, and be regarded as a terrible loss of human value to our progeny living in a highly automated world where much of life is lived on the Collaborative Commons.

  Jeremy Rifkin

  Loss, Grandchildren, Ideas

  Jeremy Rifkin (2014). “The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism”, p.117, Palgrave Macmillan

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• Shows were very different then - even as the headliner we did a very short set by today's standards and sound systems were really primitive. But the girls made it all worthwhile!

  Peter Asher

  Girl, Hair, Different

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• When you look at the paintings at Chauvet Cave, they're not primitive or like children's little scribbles, it bursts on the scene fully accomplished and when you look through the faces of cultural history, art history, it has never gotten any better.

  Werner Herzog

  Art, Children, Looks

  "Cave of Forgotten Dreams (3D) - Werner Herzog interview". Interview with Rob Carnevale, www.indielondon.co.uk.

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• The prehistorical and primitive period represents the true infancy of the mind.

  James Mark Baldwin

  Mind, Periods, Infancy

  James Mark Baldwin (1913). “History of Psychology: A Sketch and an Interpretation”

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• Cannibalism to a certain moderate extent is practised among several of the primitive tribes in the Pacific, but it is upon the bodies of slain enemies alone; and horrible and fearful as the custom is, immeasurably as it is to be abhorred and condemned, still I assert that those who indulge in it are in other respects humane and virtuous.

  Herman Melville

  Indulge In, Enemy, Cannibalism

  Herman Melville (2017). “The Complete Novels of Herman Melville: Sea Tales, Maritime Adventures & Philosophical Novels: Moby-Dick, Typee, Omoo, Mardi, Redburn, White-Jacket, Pierre, Israel Potter, The Confidence-Man & Billy Budd, Sailor”, p.175, e-artnow

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• If the hero is not a person, the emblem
  Of him, even if Xenophon, seems
  To stand taller than a person stands, has
  A wider brow, large and less human
  Eyes and bruted ears: the man-like body
  Of a primitive.

  Wallace Stevens

  Hero, Eye, Men

  Wallace Stevens (1997). “Collected Poetry and Prose”

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