Being Primal Quotes & Sayings

I start off with the obvious, that it makes no sense either to believe or to disbelieve in God until a substantial and intelligent definition or concept should be offered. Belief or disbelief is a secondary consideration, contingent on the intelligibility and cogency of the premise; the primal unintelligence or irrationality of moderns is revealed by their eagerness to leap to a conclusion without ever being curious what the hell the original premise was. — Kenny Smith

I always choose to look, as much as one can, at the supernatural not being something that exists outside of nature, but a deeper, fundamental heart of nature that perhaps humans ... have lost touch with. It's a more primal thing than perhaps we are attuned to in our modern, self-aware way of life. — Alan Ball

I don't really understand it even now, It does have an angle which is attached to something quite primal in girls. I guess people want it to define them, like 'I'm a Twilight fan.' That's crazy to me. I think people really just like being part of a crowd. There's something just tremendously exciting about hyping yourself up to that level. — Robert Pattinson

Ambition, I have come to believe, is the most primal and sacred fundament of our being. To feel ambition and to act upon it is to embrace the unique calling of our souls. Not to act upon that ambition is to turn our backs on ourselves and on the reason for our existence. Those — Steven Pressfield

But those days of being too terrified to move or breathe were left behind in my childhood. I've been through too much and it has hardened some primal part of me that no longer panics. — Patricia Cornwell

Curiosity's primal. Our senses scan our surroundings, alerting us most urgently about sudden change. Useful, that. Change can mean opportunity. It can mean danger. Finding lunch or being lunch. We're hard-wired to notice the unexpected, then take action. — Julie Czerneda

I was so scared about being discovered, but nobody came. Nobody heard. In my own ears, though, my sobs sounded primal and scary, like something I would have turned off if I'd been able to. — Sarah Dessen

I remember once visiting an outdoor exhibition of sculpture in Arnhem, the Netherlands. One of the artists had placed this notice at the base of a majestic beech: "Statues are hewn by fools like me: only God could make this tree." The Taoists looked at the inside of the tree. They saw God present, not as the super-sculptor, but as the primal force from which the tree drew its being and its specific form. Becoming aware of this divine origin was for them "great knowledge," to be distinguished from the "small knowledge" of our petty, every-day existence. — John Wijngaards

As a child I was attracted to Tarzan and everything that had to do with jungles. It seemed to me
and this is in retrospect
that there was something primal, something right about it. Tarzan represented a pure being, somehow before the fall. — Jean Liedloff

The phenomenon I'm describing, rooted so firmly in that primal human drive for self-preservation, probably doesn't sound surprising: We all know that people bring their best selves to interactions with their bosses and save their lesser moments for their peers, spouses, or therapists. And yet, so many managers aren't aware of it when it's happening (perhaps because they enjoy being deferred to). It simply doesn't occur to them that after they get promoted to a leadership position, no one is going to come out and say, "Now that you are a manager, I can no longer be as candid with you." Instead, many new leaders assume, wrongly, that their access to information is unchanged. But that is just one example of how hidden-ness affects a manager's ability to lead. — Ed Catmull

If it has been revealed to man that the Almighty made him out of the dust of the earth, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, it is in vain to tell a Christian that man was originally a speck of albumen, and passed through the stages of monads and monkeys, before he attained his present intellectual preeminence. If it be a received truth that the Creator has repeatedly interposed in the government of the universe and displayed his immediate agency in miraculous interpositions, it is an insult to any reader to tell him that the being slumbers on his throne and rules under a "primal arrangement in his counsels," and "by a code of laws of unbending operation. — David Brewster

Again and again a man would tell me about early childhood feelings of emotional exuberance, of unrepressed joy, of feeling connected to life and to other people, and then a rupture happened, a disconnect, and that feeling of being loved, of being embraced, was gone. Somehow the test of manhood, men told me, was the willingness to accept this loss, to not speak it even in private grief. Sadly, tragically, these men in great numbers were remembering a primal moment of heartbreak and heartache: the moment that they were compelled to give up their right to feel, to love, in order to take their place as patriarchal men. — Bell Hooks

At last, Mythic feeling and conscious perception no longer confront each other as antagonists but as allies. Passionate nationalism is no longer directed toward tribal, dynastic or theological loyalties, but toward that primal substance, the racially based nationhood itself. Here is the message which will one day melt away all dross, eliminate all that is base, and bring into being all that is noble. — Alfred Rosenberg

A couple of years ago, I read the findings of a study on the effects of divorced and separated parents talking negatively about their exes in the presence of their children. What I remember about the study most vividly is really just one thing: that it's devastating for a child to hear one parent speak ill of the other. In fact, so much so that the researchers found it was less psychologically damaging if a parent said directly to the child "You are a worthless piece of shit" than it was for a parent to say "Your mother/father is a worthless piece of shit."
I don't remember if they had any theories about why that was so, but it made sense to me. I think we all have something sturdier inside of us that rears up when we're being attacked that we simply can't call upon when someone we love is being attacked, especially if that someone is our parent, half of us-the primal other- and the person doing the attacking is the other half, the other primal other. — Cheryl Strayed

Every instinct that is found in any man is in all men. The strength of the emotion may not be so overpowering, the barriers against possession not so insurmountable, the urge to accomplish the desire less keen. With some, inhibitions and urges may be neutralized by other tendencies. But with every being the primal emotions are there. All men have an emotion to kill; when they strongly dislike some one they involuntarily wish he was dead. I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction. — Clarence Darrow

Love is about control and loss of control. In love, we give ourselves up to each other. We lose control or, rather, we cede control to another, trusting in a way we would never otherwise trust, letting the other person hold the deepest part of our being in their hands, with the capacity to hurt it mortally. This cession of control is a deeply terrifying thing, which is why we crave it and are drawn to it like moths to the flame, and why we have to trust it unconditionally. In love, so many hazardous uncertainties in life are resolved: the constant negotiation with other souls, the fear and distrust that lie behind almost every interaction, the petty loneliness that we learned to live with as soon as we grew apart from our mother's breast. We lose all this in the arms of another. We come home at last to a primal security, made manifest by each other's nakedness ...
And with that loss of control comes mutual power, the power to calm, the power to redeem, and the power to hurt. — Andrew Sullivan

People try to live vicariously through fighters, but it's one-on-one; it's primal. There's no other feeling like it. The problem for me was accepting it - that nothing compares to being champ. — Sugar Ray Leonard

Perhaps it is to fulfill this primal urge that runners and joggers get up every morning and pound the streets in cities all over the world. To feel the stirring of something primeval deep down in the pits of our bellies. To feel "a little bit wild." Running is not exactly fun. Running hurts. It takes effort. Ask any runner why he runs, and he will probably look at you with a wry smile and say, "I don't know." But something keeps us going. We may obsess about our PBs and mileage count, but these things alone are not enough to get us out running... What really drives us is something else, this need to feel human, to reach below the multitude of layers of roles and responsibilites that societ y has placed on us, down below the company name tags, and even the father, husband, and son, labels, to the pure, raw human being underneath. At such moments, our rational mind becomes redundant. We move from thought to feeling. — Adharanand Finn

In our culture of constant access and nonstop media, nothing feels more like a curse from God than time in the wilderness. To be obscure, to be off the beaten path, to be in the wilderness feels like abandonment. It seems more like exile than a vacation. To be so far off of everyone's radar that the world might forget about us for a while? That's almost akin to death ... [But] far from being punishment, judgment, or a curse, the wilderness is a gift. It's where we can experience the primal delight of being fully known and delighted in by God. — Jonathan Martin

Our lives are pretty calm. Merging on the freeway in the closest you get to risking your life. So what's missing now is that primal emotion of being scared to death, and I think that's why people crave thrills like roller coasters or scary movies. They give you the chance to feel this very primal emotion in a very controlled environment. — Oren Peli

Drift. Down through deltas of former girlfriends, degrees of confirmation of girlfriendhood, personal sightings of Rez or Lo together with whichever woman in whatever public place, each account illuminated with the importance the event had held for whoever had posted it. This being for Laney the most peculiar aspect of this data, the perspective in which these two loomed. Human in every detail but then not so. Everything scrupulously, fanatically accurate, probably, but always assembled around the hollow armature of celebrity. He could see celebrity here, not like Kathy's idea of a primal substance, but as a paradoxical quality inherent in the substance of the world. He saw that the quantity of data accumulated here by the band's fans was much greater than everything the band themselves had ever generated. And their actual art, the music and the videos, was the merest fragment of that. — William Gibson

It would be a primal offering of food from man to woman and a satisfyingly primitive declaration of intent. However, he mused, one could never be sure these days who would be offended by being handed a dead mallard bleeding from a breast full of tooth-breaking shot and sticky about the neck with dog saliva. — Helen Simonson

Today's children are taught by our culture that we are a cosmic accident. Something slithered out of the primal slime and over billions of years evolved into a human being. We are cousins, ten times removed, to the ape at the zoo eating his own excrement. — Gary Bauer

There was something being settled here, and if it was primal and barbaric and petty and stupid, it was still important. — Brent Weeks

A scream is a sound we make that is born of intense feeling. A scream of fear, of being startled, is often high-pitched. It may be short or prolonged. A scream may also accompany delight or amusement, though often that is more of a squeal. And a scream of sorrow or rage ... well, that is an entirely different thing. That comes from a darker place, from the depths of our souls, and when we scream in those times, because we are sad or angry, there is a terrible knowledge that accompanies it, that we are giving voice to our emotions, to what is simply too big for our hearts to contain.
And as Li Wei cries out, I know Feng Ji is right. It is his heart I am hearing, a way of expressing what he feels over his father's loss that is both primal and beautiful, and it comes from his soul and reaches something within mine. It is the sound my own heart made when my parents died, only I didn't know it until now. — Richelle Mead

Marry me. Nay, marriage will cost us precious moments together. Let us make sweet, passionate love right here. Let me bear your children."
A primal growl signaled Miss Lynn getting over her shock at being thus addressed. She lunged forward; Jack deftly rolled off the bench, jumping up out of her reach.
"Goodness, I didn't expect you to be quite this enthusiastic about my advances. If I don't play hard to get, how will I ever know whether or not you respect me? — Kiersten White

As the Primal Being, Lord Shiva has neither ancestors, nor caste, neither guru, nor education, for he is the origin of all. — Wolf-Dieter Storl

Our species is angry on a deep level. We know something has been wrong for a long time. We are tired of being thrown the scraps. This is primal, guttural; the scream of an exhausted humanity who will not take no for an answer. — Christopher Zzenn Loren

Being naked in water - there's nothing better. It's primal and freeing. — Asher Roth

It's because you're always fighting sentiment. You're fighting sentimentality all of the time because being a mother alerts you in such a primal way. — Bret Easton Ellis

It is puzzling to me that otherwise sensitive people develop a real docility about the obvious necessity of eating, at least once a day, in order to stay alive. Often they lose their primal enjoyment of flavors and odors and textures to the point of complete unawareness. And if ever they question this progressive numbing-off, they shrug helplessly in the face of mediocrity everywhere. Bit by bit, hour by hour, they say, we are being forced to accept the not-so-good as the best, since there is little that is even good to compare it with. — M.F.K. Fisher

[Dionysos'] being torn into pieces, the genuine Dionysiac suffering, is like a transformation into air, water, earth, and fire, so that we are to regard the state of individuation as the source and primal cause of all suffering ... In the view described here we already have all the constituent elements of a profound way of looking at the world and thus, at the same time, the doctrine of the Mysteries taught by tragedy: the fundamental recognition that everything which exists is a unity; the view that individuation is the primal source of all evil; and art as the joyous hope that the spell of individuation can be broken, a premonition of unity restored. — Friedrich Nietzsche

If we were created from the very fiber of our birth parents' physical and emotional beings, don't you think our need to think about them would be innate? If we had primal conversations with our mother in the womb, wouldn't you say it is natural for us to think about her as we are growing up and growing old? And if our birth father's DNA helped determine the color of our hair and eyes, wouldn't you say that he is just as much a part of us as our mother and it is normal to want a relationship with him? Wherever we are in the spectrum of perceptions about our birth parents, we must rest assured that our thoughts are normal and healthy. They are part of the fiber of our being. Part of the package of being adopted. It is all about our identity ... our dual identity. — Sherrie Eldridge

Being the church that Jesus intended means that we must participate in God's eternal purposes for his world. Renewal means more than reinventing ourselves; it means rediscovering the primal power of the Spirit and the gospel already present in the life of the church - reconnecting with this purpose and recovering the forgotten ways. This purpose and potential have always been there, but individuals and communities have largely lost touch with them. — Alan Hirsch

Later, while my mother reclines, angry and exhausted, I recede into primal speculation. What kind of being is this? Is big John Cairncross our envoy to the future, the form of a man to end wars, rapine and enslavement and stand equal and caring with the women of the world? Or will he be trampled into oblivion by brutes? We shall find out. — Ian McEwan

Just now one of the significant historical roles of the primal people of the world is not simply to sustain their own traditions, but call the entire civilized world back to a more authentic mode of being. — Thomas Berry

One of life's primal situations; the game of hide and seek. Oh, the delicious thrill of hiding while the others come looking for you, the delicious terror of being discovered, but what panic when, after a long search, the others abandon you! You mustn't hide too well. You mustn't be too good at the game. The player must never be bigger than the game itself. — Jean Baudrillard

People want to feel united, they want to have that religious sense they want to feel like at a rave 10,000 people at the rave are feeling the same emotions, a very primal need that's not being fulfilled in the world today. — Robert Greene

I think a lot of people get intimidated by the language of music, but everyone owns music. I think there's nothing standing in between a composer and her audience. I think a lot of people feel that way because they feel it's rarefied, but it's really not. You should feel the impact of it without being able to name it because it's ultimately a primal thing. — Jeanine Tesori

I question the more or less psychoanalytic perspective that the male need to control women sexually results from some primal male "fear of women" and of women's sexual insatiability. It seems more probable that men really fear, not that they will have women's sexual appetites forced on them, or that women want to smother and devour them, but that women could be indifferent to them altogether, that men could be allowed sexual and emotional-therefore economic-access to women only on women's terms, otherwise being left on the periphery of the matrix. — Adrienne Rich

In fact, public speaking anxiety may be primal and quintessentially human, not limited to those of us born with a high-reactive nervous system. One theory, based on the writings of the sociobiologist E.O. Wilson, holds that when our ancestors lived on the savannah, being watched intently meant only one thing: a wild animal was stalking us. And when we think we're about to be eaten, do we stand tall and hold forth confidently? No. We run. In other words, hundreds of thousands of years of evolution urge us to get the hell off the stage, where we can mistake the gaze of the spectators for the glint in a predator's eye. — Susan Cain

All Being within this order, by the laws
of its own nature is impelled to find
its proper station round its Primal Cause.
Thus every nature moves across the tide
of the great sea of being to its own port,
each with its given instinct as its guide. — Dante Alighieri

Perhaps the more benign and poetic sense of God is established when we are babies in the moments of primal joy we might call 'the epiphanies of infancy' - the sensation of being blissfully held and feeling complete and at one with everything - yet having no words or no need to say it but instead to just assimilate the feeling. — Michael Leunig

Making music, being creative in some primal way, should be fun. Listening to it or playing it can and should take you out of yourself for some brief blissful moments. — Simon Price

Heavy metal is a universal energy
it's the sound of a volcano. It's rock, it's earth shattering. Somewhere in our primal being we understand. — Billy Corgan

Women worry too much about how they smell or taste. I assure you, I love to taste a woman's primal essence on my tongue." Something melted inside her. He liked it? "Really? You're not just being polite, are you, Sir?" "No, kitten, when it comes to sex, I don't have a polite bone in my body. — Kallypso Masters

What is it that is eternal: the primal phenomenon, present in the here and now, of what we call revelation? It is man's emerging from the moment of the supreme encounter, being no longer the same as he was when entering into it. — Martin Buber

As advanced as mankind likes to think it is, we all have that age-old, primal, undeniable dread of darkness. Of being unable to see danger coming. We don't like to think that we're afraid of the dark anymore, but if that's true, then why do we work so hard to make sure our cities are constantly lit? We cloak ourselves in so much light that we can barely see the stars at night. — Anonymous

Your suns and worlds are not within my ken,
I merely watch the plaguey state of men.
The little god of earth remains the same queer sprite
As on the first day, or in primal light.
His life would be less difficult, poor thing,
Without your gift of heavenly glimmering;
He calls it Reason, using light celestial
Just to outdo the beasts in being bestial.
To me he seems, with deference to Your Grace,
One of those crickets, jumping round the place,
Who takes his flying leaps, with legs so long,
Then falls to grass and chants the same old song;
But, not content with grasses to repose in,
This one will hunt for muck to stick his nose in. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

There is a primal reassurance in being touched, in knowing that someone else, someone close to you, wants to be touching you. There is a bone-deep security that goes with the brush of a human hand, a silent, reflex-level affirmation that someone is near, that someone cares. — Jim Butcher

Being a woman in the pop world, sexuality is half poison and half liberation. What's the line? I don't have a line. I am the most sexually free woman on the planet, and I genuinely am empowered from a very honest place by my sexuality. What's more primal than sex? I mean, it's so honest. If I didn't think I had the talent to back that up, I wouldn't have done it. — Lady Gaga

It's not human. It's not primal. So we don't understand it. It's a more recent mutation. The things we all have, love and hate and passion, and the need to eat and yell and screw, these are things every human has. But there's this new mutation, this ability to stand between a human being and some small measure of justice and blame it on some regulation. To say that the form was filled out incorrectly. — Dave Eggers

everything actually was all-meaningful, that every symbol and combination of symbols led not hither and yon, not to single examples, experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge. Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with a truly meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created. — Hermann Hesse

I remember, around age ten, beholding the scene in The Shining in which the hot young woman whom Jack Nicholson is lewdly embracing in the haunted hotel bathroom ages rapidly in his arms, screeching from nubile chick to putrefying corpse within seconds. I understood that the scene was supposed to represent some kind of primal horror. This was The Shining, after all. But the image of that decaying, cackling crone, her arms outstretched in desire toward the man who is backing away, has stayed with me for three decades, as a type of friend. She's part baths-ghost, part mad-Naomi. She didn't get the memo about being beyond wanting or being wanted. Or perhaps she just means to scare the shit out of him, which she does. — Maggie Nelson

I basically started performing for my mother, going, 'Love me!' What drives you to perform is the need for that primal connection. When I was little, my mother was funny with me, and I started to be charming and funny for her, and I learned that by being entertaining, you make a connection with another person. — Robin Williams

The root of all fears. Not being accepted by those we care about. Being rejected and isolated. It's a primal fear. As a species, we are meant to be part of a group. A community. We mistrust loners because we don't understand them. With the exception of our romanticizing the loner in movies and novels, of course. — Susan Mallery