Primitive Quotes - Page 25

• Survival in more primitive ages required constant alertness, but survival in today's mechanized world almost demands that we turn off our senses. In urban life especially, there is too much to see, hear and smell.

  Carole Katchen

  Smell, Survival, Age

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• It was with the utmost difficulty that ancient Rome could support the institution of six vestals; but the primitive church was filled with a great number of persons of either sex who had devoted themselves to the profession of perpetual chastity.

  Edward Gibbon

  Sex, Rome, Numbers

  Edward Gibbon (1854). “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, p.187

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• In the 20th century, we had a century where at the beginning of the century, most of the world was agricultural and industry was very primitive. At the end of that century, we had men in orbit, we had been to the moon, we had people with cell phones and colour televisions and the Internet and amazing medical technology of all kinds.

  David Gerrold

  Moon, Technology, Men

  Biography/Personal Quotes, labs.imdb.com.

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• The desire for magic cannot be eradicated. Even the most supposedly rational people attempt to practice magic in love and war. We simultaneously possess the most primitive of brain stems and the most sophisticated of cortices. The imperatives of each coexist uneasily.

  Erica Jong

  War, Practice, People

  Erica Jong (2007). “What Do Women Want?: Essays by Erica Jong”, p.40, Penguin

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• Laws have come down to us from old customs and folk-ways based on primitive ideas of man's origin, capacity and responsibility.

  Clarence Darrow

  Responsibility, Men, Law

  Clarence Darrow (2012). “Crime: Its Cause and Treatment”, p.30, The Floating Press

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• [Religion is a] primitive insurance against disaster. ... Originally religion was merely a function of the self-preservative instinct. Offer sacrifices to the gods and save your crops. And even Christianity, after all, insures heavily against the flaws in this life by belief in another.

  Rose Macaulay

  Sacrifice, Self, Belief

  Rose Macaulay (2011). “Told by an Idiot”, p.39, A&C Black

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• The impulse to ask questions is among the more primitive human lusts.

  Rose Macaulay

  Lust, Impulse, Humans

  Rose Macaulay (1926). “A Casual Commentary”

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• Poetic power is great, strong as a primitive instinct; it has its own unyielding rhythms in itself and breaks out as out of mountains.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Strong, Mountain, Break Out

  Rainer Maria Rilke, John J. L. Mood (1994). “Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties: Translations and Considerations”, p.43, W. W. Norton & Company

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• To organize work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence.

  E. F. Schumacher

  Compassion, Attachment, People

  E.F. Schumacher (1975). “Small is Beautiful”

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• By that time it was already clear that the next prime minster was going to be Golda Meir, a woman whom I frankly detested - a mutual sentiment, I might add. I knew her as an opinionated, obstinate person, primitive in her outlook, rigid in her attitudes, with a genius for reaching and exploiting the deepest fears and prejudices of the Jewish masses. I was certain that with her as prime minister, all peace efforts would come to a total standstill.

  Uri Avnery

  Attitude, Effort, Add

  "My Friend, the Enemy". Book by Uri Avnery, 1986.

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• One often hears of a horse that shivers with terror, or of a dog that howls at something a mans eyes cannot see, and men who live primitive lives where instinct does the work of reason are fully conscious,of many things we cannot perceive at all. As life becomes more orderly, more deliberate, the supernatural world sinks farther away.

  William Butler Yeats

  Dog, Horse, Eye

  William Butler Yeats (2017). “The Cutting of an Agate”, p.9, BoD – Books on Demand

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• The idea that rhythm is intrinsically human — not just primitive — that we all have hearts that beat at a steady rate and don't stop...reminds me of life itself. In that sense my music is like certain popular music where the rhythm drives from beginning to end.

  Michael Torke

  Heart, Ideas, Beats

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• Since the so-called Age of Enlightenment, our shaky anthropocentric, rationalist egos have been brainwashed to forget what 'primitive' cultures once understood: Animals can be manifestations of celestial beings in disguise; they possess supernatural abilities, and they can be our spiritual guides and healers.

  Zeena Schreck

  Spiritual, Animal, Ego

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• It's funny, when you start talking about primitive scenes, so many people have seen their parents having sex.

  Gaspar Noe

  Sex, Talking, People

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• For me words still possess their primitive, mystical, incantatory powers. I am inclined to use them as part of an attempt to make my own reality more real for others, as part of an effort to transcend emotional danger. For me, words are a form of action, capable of influencing change. Their articulation represents a complete, lived experience.

  Ingrid Bengis

  Real, Emotional, Effort

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• We have to recognize that spirituality is a legitimate dimension in the psyche. It's a legitimate dimension in the universal scheme of things. It doesn't mean that you are superstitious, that you are in to magical, primitive thinking, if you take spirituality seriously.

  Stanislav Grof

  Mean, Thinking, Dimensions

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• The Americans are the living refutation of the Cartesian axiom, "I think, therefore I am": Americans do not think, yet they are. The American 'mind,' puerile and primitive, lacks characteristic form and is therefore open to every kind of standardization.

  Julius Evola

  Thinking, Mind, Kind

  "American 'Civilization'". Essay by Julius Evola (1945), published in his posthumous anthology "Civiltà americana. Scritti sugli Stati Uniti (1930–1968)", 2010.

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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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• Samba rhythm is a great one to sing on, but it's also got some other suggestions in it, an undercurrent of being primitive - because it is a primitive African, South American, Afro-whatever-you-call-that rhythm. So to white people, it has a very sinister thing about it.

  Mick Jagger

  White, People, Suggestions

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• It gave me a moment of exquisite satisfaction to find myself moving away from civilisation in this rude canvas canoe of a model that has served primitive races since men first went to sea.

  John Millington Synge

  Moving, Men, Race

  John Millington Synge (1999). “The Aran Islands”, p.14, Northwestern University Press

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• Poetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts.

  Robinson Jeffers

  Poetry, Instinct, Appeals

  Robinson Jeffers, Tim Hunt (1988). “The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers: Poetry 1903-1920, prose, and unpublished writings”, p.425, Stanford University Press

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• For me, DJ culture - with its obsession with collecting records and archiving everything - predated the "cloud" concept with primitive material like the mixtape. Now we would call it "collaborative filtering" or something technical, but the impulse is the same - gather fragments, make something new. That is how you will bypass the climate-change skeptics: render them totally obsolete.

  DJ Spooky

  Clouds, Records, Mixtapes

  "DJ Spooky’s Icy Philharmonic". Interview with Hannah Levintova, www.motherjones.com. October 17, 2011.

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• The human race is doomed to sink back farther and farther into the primitive night ere again it begins its bloody climb upward to civilization.

  Jack London

  Night, Race, Civilization

  Jack London (2015). “The Scarlet Plague”, p.12, Booklassic

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• English stupidity is an organism so primitive that it is apparently impossible to kill off. It reminds me of Physarum Polycephalum, the gigantic slime mould recently bred by scientists at Bonn. Bright yellow and about two millimetres thick, this monocellular creature--neither plant nor animal--grew to a size of 10 square yards before the scientists took fright and froze it. It can smell its favourite food, and move towards it at a speed of up to two centimetres an hour. This favourite food is porridge.

  Neal Ascherson

  Moving, Animal, Two

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• The thing framed says that nothing framed it; the tongue never made itself to speak, and yet talks against him that did; saying that which is made, is, and that which made it, is not. But this folly is infinite as hell, as much without light or bound as the chaos or the primitive nothing.

  Jeremy Taylor

  Light, Atheism, Tongue

  Jeremy Taylor (1841). “The Whole Sermons of Jeremy Taylor ...: And, The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living and Holy Dying : with a Biographical Memoir”, p.310

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