Primitive Life Quotes & Sayings

Tracing the record of thousands of our missing countrymen is the very primitive and essential step for justice. That is the fundamental responsibility of anyone who breathes the air and steps the soil of this nation. It is indeed the first step of the preventive mechanism of future repression, mayhem, and bloodbath against our people. — Nilantha Ilangamuwa

There is a greater strength than wealth, and it is greater because it cannot be taken away. Our strength, the strength of the proletariat, is in our muscles, in our hands to cast ballots, in our fingers to pull triggers. This strength we cannot be stripped of. It is the primitive strength, it is the strength that is to life germane, it is the strength that is stronger than wealth, and that wealth cannot take away. "But your strength is detachable. It can be taken away from you. Even now the Plutocracy is taking it away from you. In the end it will take it all away from you. And then you will cease to be the middle class. You will descend to us. You will become proletarians. And the beauty of it is that you will then add to our strength. We will hail you brothers, and we will fight shoulder to shoulder in the cause of humanity. "You — Jack London

He was beaten (he knew that); but he was not broken. He saw, once for all, that he stood no chance against a man with a club. He had learned the lesson, and in all his after life he never forgot it. That club was a revelation. It was his introduction to the reign of primitive law, and he met the introduction halfway. The facts of life took on a fiercer aspect; and while he faced that aspect uncowed, he faced it with all the latent cunning of his nature aroused. — Jack London

Primitive times are lyrical, ancient times epical, modern times dramatic. The ode sings of eternity, the epic imparts solemnity tohistory, the drama depicts life. The characteristic of the first poetry is ingeniousness, of the second, simplicity, of the third, truth. — Victor Hugo

You cannot win the war. You will seem to win but it will be an illusion. You will win the battles, kill billions, rape Worlds, take slaves, and destroy ships and weapons. But after that you will be forced to hold the subjection. Your numbers will not be expendable. You will be spread thin, exposed to other cultures that will influence you, change you. You will lose skirmishes, and in the end you will be forced back. Then will come a loss of old ethics, corruption and opportunism will replace your honor and you will know unspeakable shame and dishonor... your culture will soon be weltering back into a barbarism and disorganization which in its corruption and despair will be nothing like the proud tribal primitive life of its first barbarism. You will be aware of the difference and unable to return. — Charles V. De Vet

Our primitive ancestors learnt various behavioral characteristics like jealousy, possessiveness and aggression to ensure the survival of their wild love life in the harsh environment of Mother Nature. And all those behavioral responses eventually got engraved in our genetic blueprint. So, these are not the enemies in the path of a healthy relationship, rather when utilized properly they can even kindle the spark in a dying relationship. — Abhijit Naskar

Stereotypes are ways of making extremely primitive and simple differentiations. Differentiations of gender, race, class, social status - so ordinary social life is very much built upon a whole repertoire of stereotypes we carry around. And those are immediately laminated onto people, and it isn't just visual. — W. J. T. Mitchell

I am firmly convinced that there is life after death, not in a primitive sense but as the entry of my completely finite person into God's infinity, as a transition into another reality beyond the dimension of space and time that pure reason can neither affirm nor deny. — Hans Kung

You see, every creature alive on the earth today represents an unbroken line of life that stretches back to the first primitive organism to appear on this planet; and that is about three billion years. — George Wald

The most common trait of all primitive peoples is a reverence for the life-giving earth, and the Native American shared this elemental ethic: The land was alive to his loving touch, and he, its son, was brother to all creatures. — Stewart Udall

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy. And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches. — Anonymous

In its most primitive form, life is, therefore, no longer bound to the cell, the cell which possesses structure and which can be compared to a complex wheel-work, such as a watch which ceases to exist if it is stamped down in a mortar. No, in its primitive form life is like fire, like a flame borne by the living substance;-like a flame which appears in endless diversity and yet has specificity within it;-which can adopt the form of the organic world, of the lank grass-leaf and of the stem of the tree. — Martinus Beijerinck

CENTAUR, n. One of a race of persons who lived before the division of labor had been carried to such a pitch of differentiation, and who followed the primitive economic maxim, "Every man his own horse." — Ambrose Bierce

Life on a small farm might seem primitive, but by living such a life we become able to discover the Great Path. I believe that one who deeply respects his neighborhood and everyday world in which he lives will be shown the greatest of all worlds. — Masanobu Fukuoka

At the first stage of his dialectic, Hegel affirms that in so far as death is the common ground of man and
animal, it is by accepting death and even by inviting it that the former differentiates himself from the
latter. At the heart of this primordial struggle for recognition, man is thus identified with violent death.
The mystic slogan "Die and become what you are" is taken up once more by Hegel. But "Become what
you are" gives place to "Become what you so far are not." This primitive and passionate desire for
recognition, which is confused with the will to exist, can be satisfied only by a recognition gradually
extended until it embraces everyone. In that everyone wants equally much to be recognized by everyone,
the fight for life will cease only with the recognition of all by all, which will mark the termination of
history. The existence that Hegelian consciousness seeks to obtain is born in the hard-won glory of
collective approval. — Albert Camus

An important advance in the life of a people is the transformation of the religion of fear into the moral religion. But one must avoid the prejudice that regards the religions of primitive peoples as pure fear religions and those of the civilized races as pure moral religions. All are mixed forms, though the moral element predominates in the higher levels of social life. Common to all these types is the anthropomorphic character of the idea of God. — Albert Einstein

If you could only speak the devil fair enough, he might save you the cost of the doctor. Such strange lingering echoes of the old demon-worship might perhaps even now be caught by the diligent listener among the grey-haired peasantry; for the rude mind with difficulty associates the ideas of power and benignity. A shadowy conception of power that by much persuasion can be induced to refrain from inflicting harm, is the shape most easily taken by the sense of the Invisible in the minds of men who have always been pressed close by primitive wants, and to whom a life of hard toil has never been illuminated by any enthusiastic religious faith. To them pain and mishap present a far wider range of possibilities than gladness and enjoyment: their imagination is almost barren of the images that feed desire and hope, but is all overgrown by recollections that are a perpetual pasture to fear. — George Eliot

When I met you I was moving like a blind arrow shot in time of need. I was flint-sharp, flint-primitive. I was aim, arrow, and target. I wanted to be wounded again. I did not want to seal myself against life. I would rather be cut than dry. — Jeanette Winterson

It is the tendency of the so-called primitive mind to animate its environment. Modern depth psychology has requested us for years to withdraw these anthropomorphic projections from what is actually inanimate reality, to introject -- that is, to bring back into our own heads -- the living quality which we, in ignorance, cast out onto the inert things surrounding us. Such introjection is said to be the mark of true maturity in the individual, and the authentic mark of civilization in contrast to mere social culture, such as one find in a tribe. A native of Africa is said to view his surroundings as pulsing with a purpose, a life, which is actually within himself; once these childish projections are withdrawn, he sees that the world is dead, and that life resides solely within himself. When he reaches this sophisticated point he is said to be either mature or sane... — Philip K. Dick

Life had already taught Stephen one thing, and that was that never must human beings be allowed to suspect that a creature fears them. The fear of the one is a spur to the many, for the primitive hunting instinct dies hard -- it is better to face a hostile world than to turn one's back for a moment. — Radclyffe Hall

A sophisticated human can become primitive. What this really means is that the human's way of life changes. Old values change, become linked to the landscape with it's plants and animals. This new existence requires a working knowledge of those multiplex and cross-linked events usually referred to as Nature. It requires a measure of respect for the inertial power within such natural systems. When a human gains this knowledge and respect, that is called "being primitive". The converse, of course, is equally true: the primitive human can become sophisticated, but not without incurring dreadful psychological damage. — Frank Herbert

Such were the shepherds of Judea! In appearance, rough and savage as the gaunt dogs with them around the blaze; in fact, simple-minded, tender-hearted; effects in due, in part, to the primitive life they led, but chiefly to their constant care of things lovable and helpless. — Lew Wallace

Life, from beginning to end, is fear. Yes, it is pain, yes, it is desire, but more than anything it is fear; a certain amount rational, an enormous amount irrational. All political cruelties stem from that overwhelming fear. To push back the threatening forces, to offer primitive sacrifices, to give up some in the hope that others will be savedthat is the power struggle. That is the outsidedness of the poor, the feeble, the infantile. That is the outsidedness of Jews. That is the outsidedness of blacks. That is the outsidedness of women. — Vivian Gornick

. . . even the surprise of harmless others in the house disturbed me. I didn't want my inner rot on display, even accidentally. Living alone was frightening in that way. No one to police the spill of yourself, the ways you betrayed your primitive desires. Like a cocoon built around you, made of your own naked proclivities and never tidied into the patterns of actual human life. — Emma Cline

The primitive history of the species is all the more fully retained in its germ-history in proportion as the series of embryonic forms traversed is longer; and it is more accurately retained the less the mode of life of the recent forms differs from that of the earlier, and the less the peculiarities of the several embryonic states must be regarded as transferred from a later to an earlier period of life, or as acquired independently. — Fritz Muller

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

Ife onye metalu' ['what a man commits'] - a statement unclear and menacing in its very inconclusiveness. What a man commits ... Follows him? Comes back to take its toll? Was that all? No, that was only part of it ... The real burden of that cryptic scripture seemed to turn the matter right around. Whatever we see following a man, whatever fate comes to take its revenge on him, can only be what that man in some way or another, in a previous life if not in this, has committed. That was it! So those three words wrapped in an archaic tongue and tucked away at the tail of the bus turn out to be the opening segment of a full-blooded heathen antiphony offering a primitive and quite deadly exposition of suffering. The guilty suffers; the sufferer is guilty. As for the righteous, those whose arms are straight, they will always prosper! — Chinua Achebe

Tribal life comes automatically to an end when a primitive people begins to live in a town or a city, for sooner or later a tribal organization is found to be incompatible with life in a city. — Arthur Keith

One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike
and yet it is the most precious thing we have. — Albert Einstein

Mohammed knew that most people are terribly cowardly and stupid. That is why he promised two beautiful women to every courageous warrior who dies in battle. This is the kind of language a soldier understands. When he believes that he will be welcomed in this manner in the afterlife, he will be willing to give his life, he will be enthusiastic about going to battle and not fear death. You may call this primitive and you may laugh about it, but it is based on deeper wisdom. A religion must speak a man's language. — Heinrich Himmler

Except with their life mate. I'd convinced myself those women possessed a secret love potion they weren't sharing with the general public - one that tamed the primitive ways of a Shifter and made them do romantic things like buy flowers and rub their woman's feet with scented oils. — Dannika Dark

Counter-culture celebrates the supposedly natural life of primitive peoples. Its members wear beads, headbands, body paint, and colorful tattered clothing; they yearn to be a tribe. They seem to believe that tribal peoples are nonmaterialistic, spontaneous, and reverently in touch with occult sources of enchantment ... — Marvin Harris

And such in fact is the behaviour of the specialist. In politics, in art, in social usages, in the other sciences, he will adopt the attitude of primitive, ignorant man; but he will adopt them forcefully and with self-sufficiency, and will not admit of- this is the paradox- specialists in those matters. By specialising him, civilisation has made him hermetic and self-satisfied within his limitations; but this very inner feeling of dominance and worth will induce him to wish to predominate outside his speciality. The result is that even in this case, representing a maximum of qualification in man- specialisation- and therefore the thing most opposed to the mass-man, the result is that he will behave in almost all spheres of life as does the unqualified, the mass-man. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

If we are to succeed in the great task before us we must adopt a humbler attitude towards the elementary things of life than that which is implied in our frequent boasting about our so-called 'Conquest of Nature.' We have put ourselves on a pinnacle in the pride of an imagined conquest. But we cannot separate ourselves from nature if we would... There can be no quarrel between ourselves and nature any more than there can be a quarrel between a man's head and his feet. If such a quarrel is invented, it is the man who suffers, including both his head and his feet... We have come to regard nature as something primitive, terrible, and squalid. If she is so, it is we who have made her so. — Walter Ernest Christopher James

As Miriam released my hand I felt that she and Midwife Bell had returned to a more primitive world, where men never intruded and even their role in conception was unknown. Here the chain of life was mother to daughter, daughter to mother. Fathers and sons belonged in the shadows with the dogs and livestock, like the retriever growling at Midwife Bell's unfamiliar car from the window of my neighbours' living room. — J.G. Ballard

The fact that we have not yet found the slightest evidence for life - much less intelligence - beyond this Earth does not surprise or disappoint me in the least. Our technology must still be laughably primitive, we may be like jungle savages listening for the throbbing of tom-toms while the ether around them carries more words per second than they could utter in a lifetime — Arthur C. Clarke

Man must be able to escape civilization if he is to survive. Some of his greatest needs are for refuges and retreats where he can recapture for a day or a week the primitive conditions of life. — William O. Douglas

Don't ever for a minute make the mistake of looking down your nose at westerns. They're art - the good ones, I mean. They deal in life and sudden death and primitive struggle, and with the basic emotions - love, hate, and anger - thrown in. We'll have westerns films as long as the cameras keep turning. The fascination that the Old West has will never die. And as long as people want to pay money to see me act, I'll keep on making westerns until the day I die. — John Wayne

The Jewish scriptures admirably illustrate the development from the religion of fear to moral religion, which is continued in the New Testament. The religions of all civilized peoples, especially the peoples of the Orient, are primarily moral religions. The development from a religion of fear to moral religion is a great step in a nation's life. That primitive religions are based entirely on fear and the religions of civilized peoples purely on morality is a prejudice against which we must be on our guard. The truth is that they are all intermediate types, with this reservation, that on the higher levels of social life the religion of morality predominates. — Albert Einstein

As I set out each day, I felt like a young child again. One who hadn't yet learned the rules of manmade time; the rules of clocks and calendars, of weekdays and weekends. Except the primitive markers of day and night, time lay ahead of me in a continuous, undefined mass. — Alice Steinbach

An absolutely devastating ridicule of all that is false, primitive, and vicious in current American life: the abuses of power, hero worship, aimless violence, materialistic obsession, intolerance, and every form of hypocrisy. — Terry Southern

It's millions of leeches from a primitive country come here to leech off you and, with it, they are ruining the schools, the hospitals, and a lot of life in America. — Jay Severin

Life in cyberspace is often conducted in primitive frontier conditions, but it is a life which, at its best, is more egalitarian than elitist and more decentralized than hierarchical. It serves individuals and communities, not mass audiences, and it is extraordinarily multi-faceted in the purposes to which it is put. — Mitch Kapor

If a serious statement is defined as one that may be made in terms of waking life, poetry will never rise to the level of seriousness. It lies beyond seriousness, on that more primitive and original level where the child, the animal, the savage, and the seer belong, in the region of dream, enchantment, ecstasy, laughter. To understand poetry we must be capable of donning the child's soul like a magic cloak and of forsaking man's wisdom for the child's. — Johan Huizinga

The institution of a leisure class has emerged gradually during the transition from primitive savagery to barbarism; or more precisely, during the transition from a peaceable to a consistently warlike habit of life. — Thorstein Veblen

I am an abstract artist in the sense that I abstract. I cannot be called non-figurative while I am still interested in the modern magic of space, primitive sex forms, the sensual and erotic, disconcerting contours, the things of life. — Sean William Scott

and in that case the "primitive" belief - found throughout the ancient and pagan world - that God exists in every blade of grass, every creature, and even the earth and sky, may contain the highest truth. Arriving at that truth is the purpose of spiritual life, and each stage of God takes us on a journey whose end point is total clarity, a sense of peace that nothing can disturb. — Deepak Chopra

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

Modern anthropology ... opposes the utilitarian assumption that the primitive chants as he sows seed because he believes that otherwise it will not grow, the assumption that his economic goal is primary, and his other activities are instrumental to it. The planting and the cultivating are no less important than the finished product. Life is not conceived as a linear progression directed to, and justified by, the achievement of a series of goals; it is a cycle in which ends cannot be isolated, one which cannot be dissected into a series of ends and means. — John Carroll

Primitive man's life in Hobbes' famous words, was short, brutish, and nasty; and this very savagery and anxiety became the justification for an absolute order established, like Descartes' ideal world, by a single providential mind and will: that of the absolute ruler or monarch. Until men were incorporated into Leviathan, that is, the all-powerful state through which the king's will was carried out, they were dangerous to their fellows and a burden to themselves. — Lewis Mumford

The theory is simple.
Every boy, every man, is really
a bit of a golden retriever
or a big chocolate Lab.
Watch any man's eyes
at the bounce of a ball.
His head tilts slightly sideways, just a hair,
as a primitive focus
comes to life. — Toby Barlow

Fear or happiness... Parenting or impulse... Primitive stupidity or vain self-destruction... — Plamen Chetelyazov

He's focused on something - or someone - over her shoulder.
The harmonious warbling of the rainforest morphs into organized disarray, as if a primitive maestro has thrown conducting to the wind and let Mother Nature take over. Birds trill a warning as the breeze rustles the plant life. Wings flutter overhead. A crescendo of stridulation changes tempo, the insects seemingly performing a sonata as the rhythm shifts yet again.
"What - who is it?" Summer asks in a strained whisper.
His gaze lands on her, his brows furrowing. "The Forsaken. — Laura Kreitzer

The common view of marriage as a primitive institution implies in the man more than arbitrary superiority, such as he exercised over the child, which still remained free. The woman's slavery was assumed to be for life. — Henry Adams

If you have moved over vast territories and dared to love silly things, you will have learned even from the most primitive items collected and put aside in your life. — Ray Bradbury

Here we stand in the middle of this new world with our primitive brain, attuned to the simple cave life, with terrific forces at our disposal, which we are clever enough to release, but whose consequences we cannot comprehend. — Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

It is not merely enough to love literature if one wishes to spend one's life as a writer. It is a dangerous undertaking on the most primitive level. For, it seems to me, the act of writing with serious intent involves enormous personal risk. It entails the ongoing courage for self-discovery. It means one will walk forever on the tightrope, with each new step presenting the possiblity of learning a truth about oneself that is too terrible to bear. — Harlan Ellison

The world of magic is double, natural, and supernatural. Magic is impossible in a purely materialist world, a purely sceptical world, a world of pure reason. Magic depends on, it makes use of, the body, the body of desire, the libido, or life-force which Sigmund Freud said stirred the primitive cells as the sun heated the stony surface of the earth-cells which, according to him, always had the lazy, deep desire to give up striving, to return to the quiescent state from which they were roused.
-The Biographer's Tale — A.S. Byatt

We cannot suppress our defining humanity and innate spirituality. The quivering pulsation of life force buried within the scarlet corpus of our blood waits like a winged angel adamant to erupt from a cocoon of unholy encapsulation whenever we return to ligature of our primitive essence. — Kilroy J. Oldster

It was shameless how life made fun of one; it was a joke, a cause for weeping! Either one lived and let one's senses play, drank full at the primitive mother's breast - which brought great bliss but was no protection against death; then one lived like a mushroom in the forest, colorful today and rotten tomorrow. Or else one put up a defense, imprisoned oneself for work and tried to build a monument to the fleeting passage of life - then one renounced life, was nothing but a tool; one enlisted in the service of that which endured, but one dried up in the process and lost one's freedom, scope, lust for life...
Ach, life made sense only if one achieved both, only if it was not split by this brittle alternative! To create, without sacrificing one's senses for it. To live, without renouncing the mobility of creating. Was that impossible? — Hermann Hesse

...I found that much of the romance had left the trenches. The old days, from the beginning to July, 1915, were all so delightfully precarious and primitive. Amateurish trenches and rough and ready life, which to my mind gave this war what it sadly needs - a touch of romance. — Bruce Bairnsfather

I see them in the primitive silkscreen the brain is able to produce, maybe eight inches in front of my closed eyes, miniaturised by time and distance, riddled by visual static, each figure a dancing red ribbon. These are among the people I've tried to know twice, the second time in memory and language. Through them, myself. They are what I've become, in ways I don't understand but which I believe will accrue to a rounded truth, a second life for me as well as for them. — Don DeLillo

I'm not against the concept of Creators/God, I'm against the antiquated beliefs that there are evil things, which are merely axioms we concocted out of our inadequacy as mortal beings, primitive brain, and underdeveloped technology. — Andreas Laurencius

A regard for the public tranquillity, which would so frequently have been interrupted by annual or by occasional elections, induced the primitive Christians to constitute an honourable and perpetual magistracy, and to choose one of the wisest and most holy among their presbyters to execute, during his life, the duties of their ecclesiastical governor. It was under these circumstances that the lofty title of Bishop began to raise itself above the humble appellation of presbyter; and while the latter remained the most natural distinction for the members of every Christian senate, the former was appropriated to the dignity of its new president. — Edward Gibbon

No human society is too primitive to have some kind of literature. The only thing is that primitive literature hasn't yet become distinguished from other aspects of life: it's still embedded in religion, magic and social ceremonies. — Northrop Frye

But for a little second, I just want to sit in this stupid chair and believe there is this sort of magic between two people and I can be this prized someone to this sexy, raw, primitive man who's so strong, mysterious, and playful to me, he compels me like nothing in my life ever has. — Katy Evans

Simpson, the student of divinity, it was who arranged his conclusions probably with the best, though not most scientific, appearance of order. Out there, in the heart of unreclaimed wilderness, they had surely witnessed something crudely and essentially primitive. Something that had survived somehow the advance of humanity had emerged terrifically, betraying a scale of life monstrous and immature. He envisaged it rather as a glimpse into prehistoric ages, when superstitions, gigantic and uncouth, still oppressed the hearts of men: when the forces of nature were still untamed, the Powers that may have haunted a primeval universe not yet withdrawn. To this day he thinks of what he termed years later in a sermon 'savage and formidable Potencies lurking behind the souls of men, not evil perhaps in themselves, yet instinctively hostile to humanity as it exists.'
("The Wendigo") — Algernon Blackwood

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

When man comes to the realization that he is not the "favorite" of God; that he was not specially created, that the universe was not made for his benefit, and that he is subject to the same laws of nature as all other forms of life, then, and not until then, will he understand that he must rely upon himself, and himself alone, for whatever benefits he is to enjoy; and devote his time and energies to helping himself and his fellow men to meet the exigencies of life and to set about to solve the difficult and intricate problems of living.
The recognition of a problem is the first step to its solution - We are not "fallen" angels, nor were we "created" perfect.
On the contrary, we are the product of millions of years of an unpurposed evolution. We are the descendants and inheritors of all the defects of our primitive ancestry - the evolution of the myriad forms of life from the infinitesimal to the mammoth - from the worm to the dinosaur. — Joseph Lewis

It's in the morning, for most of us. It's that time, those few seconds when we're coming out of sleep but we're not really awake yet. For those few seconds we're something more primitive than what we are about to become. We have just slept the sleep of our most distant ancestors, and something of them and their world still clings to us. For those few moments we are unformed, uncivilized. We are not the people we know as ourselves, but creatures more in tune with a tree than a keyboard. We are untitled, unnamed, natural, suspended between was and will be, the tadpole before the frog, the worm before the butterfly. We are for a few brief moments, anything and everything we could be. And then ... and then
ah
we open our eyes and the day is before us and ... we become ourselves. — Jerry Spinelli

It is often thought that the life of the hunter-gatherer was one of feast and famine. But most available data suggest that they were surprisingly healthy and had a fairly stable diet and lifestyle. Not so the primitive farmers. In years when the crops failed, in settlements where the population density was high and where disease weakened the ability to cope even further, life would have been very hard indeed. The settled population could not migrate to follow the food supply as could hunter-gatherers. They were trapped. — Peter Gluckman

Although some men who were easy with their words said that it was worth sacrificing one's life for a night of love with such an arousing woman, the truth was that no one made any effort to do so. Perhaps, not only to attain her but also to conjure away her dangers, all that was needed was a feeling as primitive and as simple as that of love, but that was the only thing that did not occur to anyone. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Civilization must be based on life. We should never forget that human life was created in and for millions of centuries, was nourished by primitive wildness. We cannot separate ourselves from this ancestral background. — Charles Lindbergh

in a boy like Bigger, young, unschooled, whose subjective life was clothed in the tattered rags of American "culture," this primitive fear and ecstasy were naked, exposed, unprotected by religion or a framework of government or a scheme of society whose final faiths would gain his love and trust; unprotected by trade or profession, faith or belief; opened to every trivial blast of daily or hourly circumstance. There — Richard Wright

In every human society of which we have any record, there are those who teach and those who learn, for learning a way of life is implicit in all human culture as we know it. But the separation of the teacher's role from the role of all adults who inducted the young into the habitual behavior of the group, was a comparatively late invention. Furthermore, when we do find explicit and defined teaching, in primitive societies we find it tied in with a sense of the rareness or the precariousness of some human tradition. — Margaret Mead

For there is not a single human being, not even the primitive Negro, not even the idiot, who is so conveniently simple that his being can be explained as the sum of two or three principal elements; and to explain so complex a man as Harry by the artless division into wolf and man is a hopelessly childish attempt. Harry consists of a hundred or a thousand selves, not of two. His life oscillates, as everyone's does, not merely between two poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but between thousand and thousands. — Hermann Hesse

These metaphysic rights entering into common life, like rays of light which pierce into a dense medium, are, by the laws of nature, refracted from their straight line. Indeed in the gross and complicated mass of human passions and concerns, the primitive rights of men undergo such a variety of refractions and reflections, that it becomes absurd to talk of them as if they continued in the simplicity of their original direction. The nature of man is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity: and therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable to man's nature, or to the quality of his affairs. When I hear the simplicity of contrivance aimed at and boasted of in any new political constitutions, I am at no loss to decide that the artificers are grossly ignorant of their trade, or totally negligent of their duty. — Edmund Burke

In this way a process of evolution was started that led to the development of more and more complicated, self-reproducing organisms. The first primitive forms of life consumed various materials, including hydrogen sulfide, and released oxygen. This gradually changed the atmosphere to the composition that it has today, and allowed the development of higher forms of life such as fish, reptiles, mammals, and ultimately the human race. — Stephen Hawking

I believe in mystery and, frankly, I sometimes face this mystery with great fear. In other words, I think that there are many things in the universe that we cannot perceive or penetrate, and that also we experience some of the most beautiful things in life only in a very primitive form. Only in relation to these mysteries do I consider myself to be a religious man ... — Albert Einstein

Those who are truly alive are kindly and unsuspecting in their human relationships and consequently endangered under present conditions. They assume that others think and act generously, kindly and helpfully, in accordance with the laws of life. This natural attitude, fundamental to healthy children as well as primitive man, inevitably represents a great danger in the struggle for a rational way of life as long as the emotional plague subsists, because the plague-ridden impute their own manner of thinking and acting to their fellow men. A kindly man believes that all men are kindly, while one infected with the plague believes that all men lie and cheat and are hungry for power. In such a situation, the living are at an obvious disadvantage. When they give to the plague-ridden they are sucked dry, then ridiculed or betrayed. — Wilhelm Reich

All life-forms are innocent, but man is the greatest innocent life-form that the universe has ever produced.
Man is never created bad, as some primitive "revelations" claim.
Man is both all-capable, and innocent;
Man cannot have better attributes than the ones he already has.
Once we defeat scarcity, the factor that has forced all our negative attributes into existence will be no more.
Man's nature is forged by scarcity.
Man is a child of scarcity.
Some men may currently live in abundance, even obscene abundance, but they still are the children of scarcity.
We all are. — Haroutioun Bochnakian

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

The primitive tribes permitted far less individual freedom than does modern society. Ancient wars were committed with far less moral justification than modern ones. A technology that produces debris can find, and is finding, ways of disposing of it without ecological upset. And the schoolbook pictures of primitive man sometimes omit some of the detractions of his primitive life - the pain, the disease, famine, the hard labor needed just to stay alive. From that agony of bare existence to modern life can be soberly described only as upward progress, and the sole agent for this progress is quite clearly reason itself. — Robert M. Pirsig

The day had gone by just as days go by. I had killed it in accordance with my primitive and retiring way of life. — Hermann Hesse

we should also consider the remoter analogy of the animals. Many birds and animals, especially the carnivorous, have only one mate, and the love and care of offspring which seems to be natural is inconsistent with the primitive theory of marriage. If we go back to an imaginary state in which men were almost animals and the companions of them, we have as much right to argue from what is animal to what is human as from the barbarous to the civilized man. The record of animal life on the globe is fragmentary, - the connecting links are wanting and cannot be supplied; the record of social life is still more fragmentary and precarious. Even if we admit that our first ancestors had no such institution as marriage, still the stages by which men passed from outer barbarism to the comparative civilization of China, Assyria, and Greece, or even of the ancient Germans, are wholly unknown to us. Such — Plato

I'd support life extension by whatever means, from cryonic suspension to cyborgism to coding ourselves into our computers or whatever. There is nothing noble or beautiful or dignified about dying. Like poverty, it is ugly, nasty, brutal and primitive. — Robert Anton Wilson

There is a higher form of hierarchy and that is the hierarchy of the spirit. When I stand in front of a person, I stand in front of a soul and I have met magnificent souls in bodies possessing no money, as well as parched and shallow souls in bodies bathed in riches. In the same light, I have met magnificent souls in bodies bathed in wealth, as well as parched and shallow souls in bodies that are impoverished. I am tired of people busying their minds with hierarchy based upon money, because this form of hierarchy is primitive; meanwhile there is an altogether higher form of hierarchy that is of the soul. As you judge man and woman based upon their riches, I laugh at your primitive form of judgment! When I stand in front of a human, I stand in front of a soul. — C. JoyBell C.

The old adage that people only want what they can't have or what they can't tame - is totally primitive. A being of higher origins will know instinctively that life on earth is a series of chances, moments and concepts. That's really all that you have. So when you find one of these things and it makes you burn, or it makes you feel peace inside, or it makes you look forwards and backwards and here all at the same time - that's when you know to hold onto it. And you hold onto it with every fiber of your being. Because it's in the holding on of these chances and moments and concepts that life is lived. Every other kind of living is only in vitro. I don't care what psychologists say today about how the human mind works. Because one day they will reach this pinnacle and they will see what I see and they will look upon the old ways as primitive. As long and gone. We do not wish to have what we can't have. We wish to burn in whatever flame we have stepped into. — C. JoyBell C.

The price we pay for the complexity of life is too high. When you think of all the effort you have to put in -telephonic, technological and relational -to alter even the slightest bit of behavior in this strange world we call social life, you are left pining for the straightforwardness of primitive peoples and their physical work. — Jean Baudrillard

[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

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

Scientists believe they may have discovered a primitive form of life on Jupiter's moon Europa. That primitive form of life? You guessed it, Frank Stallone. — Norm MacDonald

The idea of hunting and gathering as the best way for life has become quite popular recently, much more populare in some circles than the idea of simple farming as the best way of life. Many of the new primitives regard the beginnings of agriculture as one of humanity's major steps in the wrong direction. Most of the people who are drawn to such ideas do their actual hunting and gathering in grocery stores, but the *feeling* is there; it takes the form of a religion ... expressed by particpating in American Indian rituals - or primitive-style rituals that are created anew. — Walter Truett Anderson

I'm mixed on figs. The fleshy quality feels spooky. In Italian, il fico, fig, has a slangy turn into la fica, meaning vulva. Possibly because of the famous fig leaf exodus from Eden, it seems like the most ancient of fruits. Oddest, too - the fig flower is inside the fruit. To pull one open is to look into a complex, primitive, infinitely sophisticated life cycle tableau. — Frances Mayes

The humiliations and defeats,
given with a primitive honesty,
end not in frustration, despair or futility,
but in hunger, an ecstatic devouring hunger - for more life.
- Anais Nin — Anais Nin

The most frequent manifestations of the anima takes the form of erotic fantasy. Men may be driven to nurse their fantasies by looking at films and strip-tease shows, or by day-dreaming over pornographic material. This is a crude, primitive aspect of the anima, which becomes compulsive only when a man does not sufficiently cultivate his feeling relationships-when his feeling attitude toward life has remained infantile. — C. G. Jung

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

[In the Universe it may be that] Primitive life is very common and intelligent life is fairly rare. Some would say it has yet to occur on Earth. — Stephen Hawking

Ritual is the most primitive reflection of serious thought, a slow deposit, as it were, of people's imaginative insight into life. — Susanne Katherina Langer

I am leaving in order to have peace and quiet. To be rid of the influence of civilization. I only want to do simple, very simple art and to be able to do that, I have to immerse myself in virgin nature, see no one but savages, live their life, with no other thought in my mind but to render, the way a child would, the concepts formed in my brain and to do this with the aid of nothing but the primitive means of art, the only means that are good and true. — Paul Gauguin