Quotes & Sayings About Atavism

I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history. — W. Somerset Maugham

The difference between theism and new atheist science is the difference between mystery and certainty. Certainty is a relic, an atavism, a husk we ought to have outgrown. Mystery is openness to possibility, even at the scale now implied by physics and cosmology. The primordial human tropism toward mystery may well have provided the impetus for all that we have learned. — Marilynne Robinson

Every once in a while, large cities have narrow streets, silent passageways that allow your footsteps to echo in the stillness of the night, and it seems like everything is going back to the way it was, when there were only a few of us and we all knew each other and greeted each other on the street. — Jaume Cabre

Their [philosophers] thinking is, in fact, far less a discovery than a re-recognizing, a remembering, a return and a home-coming to a far-off, ancient common-household of the soul, out of which those ideas formerly grew: philosophizing is so far a kind of atavism of the highest order. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Have you ever seen a woman canter over the hills in the twilight? Scandal sheets are no match for atavism. — Cees Nooteboom

That which an age considers evil is usually an unseasonable echo of what was formerly considered good - the atavism of an old ideal. — Friedrich Nietzsche

If much in the world were mystery the limits of that world were not, for it was without measure or bound and there were contained within it creatures more horrible yet and men of other colors and beings which no man has looked upon and yet not alien none of it more than were their own hearts alien in them, whatever wilderness contained there and whatever beasts. — Cormac McCarthy

We are tossed about by external causes in many ways, and like waves driven by contrary winds, we waver and are unconscious of the issue and our fate.' We think we are most ourselves when we are most passionate, whereas it is then we are most passive, caught in some ancestral torrent of impulse or feeling, and swept on to a precipitate reaction which meets only part of the situation because without thought only part of a situation can be perceived. — Will Durant

What an age experiences as evil is usually an untimely reverberation echoing what was previously experienced as good - the atavism of an older ideal. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I suppose my liking for Italy is partly atavism, my family are of the old Roman stock. They came from the Alps north of Venice. — Gore Vidal

I told Mr. Rook you were disinherited and he rushed back to help you. Mr. Rook is a rather remarkable person."
"Oh, chuck it," said Mr. Rook with a hostile air.
"Mr. Rook is a monster," said Father Brown with scientific calm. "He is an anachronism, an atavism, a brutal survivor of the Stone Age. If there was one barbarous superstition we all supposed to be utterly extinct and dead in these days, it was that notion about honour and independence. — G.K. Chesterton

I don't know a thing about cats.
I know everything else, life and its archipelago,
seas and unpredictable cities,
botany,
the pistil and its scandals,
the pluses and minuses of math.
I know the earth's volcanic funnels
and the crocodile's unreal shell,
the fireman's unseen kindness
and the priest's blue atavism.
cat leave
But a cat I can't figure out.
My mind slipped on its indifference.
Its eyes hold ciphers of gold. — Pablo Neruda

There is a fundamental reason why we look at the sky with wonder and longing - for the same reason that we stand, hour after hour, gazing at the distant swell of the open ocean. There is something like an ancient wisdom, encoded and tucked away in our DNA, that knows its point of origin as surely as a salmonid knows its creek. Intellectually, we may not want to return there, but the genes know, and long for their origins - their home in the salty depths. But if the seas are our immediate source, the penultimate source is certainly the heavens.
The spectacular truth is - and this is something that your DNA has known all along - the very atoms of your body - the iron, calcium, phosphorus, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and on and on - were initially forged in long-dead stars. This is why, when you stand outside under a moonless, country sky, you feel some ineffable tugging at your innards. We are star stuff. Keep looking up. — Gerald D. Waxman

He was a magnificent atavism, a man so purely primitive that he was of the type that came into the world before the development of the moral nature. He was not immoral, but merely unmoral. As — Jack London

Now there is a modern-day anthropology* for the criminal type: a great number of so-called 'born criminals' have pale faces, large cheekbones, a coarse lower jaw, and deeply shining eyes. How can one not recall this when one thinks of Lenin and thousands like him? How many pale faces, high cheekbones and strikingly asymmetric features mark the soldiers of the Red Army and, generally speaking, also of the common Russian people - how many of them, these savage types, have Mongolian atavism directly in their blood! They are all from Murom, the white-eyed Chud. And it is precisely these individuals, these very Russichi, who gave us so many 'daring pirates', so many vagabonds, escapees, scoundrels and tramps - it is precisely these people whom we have recruited for the glory, pride and hope of the Russian social revolution. So why should we feign surprise at the results? — Ivan Bunin

Catching a glimpse of his rather hippyish form in a mirror, he wonders at this atavism of apparel, is it an inversion of foetal ontogeny, in which the phenotype passes through previous fashion stages? Soon there will be gaiters and gloves ... I will probably die, he thinks, clad in animal skins. — Will Self