Primitive Living Quotes & Sayings

From some Christians as far back as the twelfth century, certainly from farther back in so-called primitive cultures, and from some ecologists of our own time, we have the idea of a great kindness including and binding together all beings: the living and the nonliving, the plants and animals, the water, the air, the stones. All, ultimately, are of a kind, belonging together, interdependently, in this world. From the point of view of Genesis I or of the 104th Psalm, we would say that all are of one kind, one kinship, one nature, because all are creatures. — Wendell Berry

It is odd to think that there is a word for something which, strictly speaking, does not exist, namely, "rest." We distinguish between living and dead matter; between moving bodies and bodies at rest. This is a primitive point of view. What seems dead, a stone or the proverbial "door-nail," say, is actually forever in motion. We have merely become accustomed to judge by outward appearances; by the deceptive impressions we get through our senses. — Max Born

Flair-a primitive kind of style-may be innate, but I think knowledgeable taste is learned, the result of travel, experience, living, education. — Albert Hadley

We're living in a Dark Age of macroeconomics. Remember, what defined the Dark Ages wasn't the fact that they were primitive - the Bronze Age was primitive, too. What made the Dark Ages dark was the fact that so much knowledge had been lost, that so much known to the Greeks and Romans had been forgotten by the barbarian kingdoms that followed. — Paul Krugman

Just because you are living in a stupid country, you don't have to be stupid! Isolate yourself from the fools! Protect your mind to be poisoned by the deceitful media, by the dishonest politicians, by the primitive culture and the illogical traditions! Rise above the lownesses of the system like a falcon rising from the marshland and start shining like a star for others to see you and to come near to you! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

You will place the benevolent yoke of reason on the necks of the unknown beings on other planets, who may still be living in that primitive state known as freedom. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

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

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

I hate the present modes of living and getting a living. Farming and shopkeeping and working at a trade or profession are all odious to me. I should relish getting my living in a simple, primitive fashion. — Henry David Thoreau

I have discovered in a lifetime of traveling in primitive regions, a lifetime of seeing people living in the wilderness and using it, that there is a hard core of wilderness need in everyone, a core that makes its spiritual values a basic human necessity. There is no hiding it ... Unless we can preserve places where the endless spiritual needs of man can be fulfilled and nourished, we will destroy our culture and ourselves. — Sigurd F. Olson

The naturalist E. O. Wilson gave a name to this warm, fuzzy feeling I'm experiencing: biophilia. He defined it as "the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms." Wilson argued that our connection to nature is deeply ingrained in our evolutionary past. That connection isn't always positive. Take snakes, for instance. The chances of encountering a snake, let alone dying from a snakebite, are extraordinarily remote. Yet modern humans continue to fear snakes even more, studies have found, than car accidents or homicide or any of the dozens of other more plausible ways we might meet our demise. The fear of snakes resides deep in our primitive brain. The fear of the Long Island Expressway, while not insignificant, was added much more recently. — Eric Weiner

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

Marriage has become a battlefield where two persons are fighting for supremacy. Of course, the man has his own way: rough and more primitive. The woman has her own way: feminine, softer, a little more civilized, more subdued. But the situation is the same. Now psychologists are talking about marriage as an intimate enmity. And that's what it has proved to be. Two enemies are living together pretending to be in love, expecting the other to give love; and the same is being expected by the other. Nobody is ready to give - nobody has it. How can you give love if you don't have it? — Rajneesh

An example of perfection in nature is the cockroach. It was living six million years before us and it may outlast us by that long. The brain of a cockroach is a splendid little engine. It doesn't evolve and it doesn't need to. The human brain is a disaster from the point of view of perfection
great intellectual power combined with primitive emotional reactions. Human beings today are living with terrible risks of their own creation
nuclear weapons, the exploitation of natural resources, the great disparity between the wealthy and the poor. Our brains will probably bring us to destruction, but we also have the possibility of growth, evolution. I prefer being a human. We shouldn't always look for perfection, in nature or our lives. — Rita Levi-Montalcini

. . . 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

You will find that there is no death at all, in the true sense of the word, but everything goes on living, transmuting and becoming perfect according to primitive laws. — Franz Bardon

Discovery is adventure. There is an eagerness, touched at times with tenseness, as man moves ahead into the unknown. Walking the wilderness is indeed like living. The horizon drops away, bringing new sights, sounds, and smells from the earth. When one moves through the forests, his sense of discovery is quickened. Man is back in the environment from which he emerged to build factories, churches, and schools. He is primitive again, matching his wits against the earth and sky. He is free of the restraints of society and free of its safeguards too. — William O. Douglas

Transition and change - guaranteed to cause anxiety. That anxiety shows itself in physical and behavioral ways, but also with thoughts (sometimes really crazy ones). This is the (primitive/automatic) brain's way of keeping us safe from the danger of change. We end up getting so involved with the feeling and thoughts of anxiety, we get distracted from the "danger". If we trust the anxiety then our primitive brain has succeeded in "protecting" us from the danger. I suggest not believing, trusting, or taking direction from the anxiety and continue your pursuits forward. Then, you will be amazed at your ability to attract and reveal your true capabilities, your light, your magic. — Charles F. Glassman

Further expanding the already large class of Foucauldian apparatuses, I shall cal an apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, determine, intercept, model, control , or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings. Not only, therefore, prisons, madhouses, the panopticon, schools, confession, factories, disciplines, juridical measures, and so forth (whose connection with power is in a certain sense evident), but also the pen, writing, literature, philosophy, agriculture, cigarettes, navigation, computers, cellular telephones and - why not - language itself, which is perhaps the most ancient of apparatuses - one in which thousands and thousands of years ago a primitive inadvertently let himself be captured, probably without realizing the consequences that he was about to face. — Giorgio Agamben

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

It is not easy to get rid of weeds; but it is easy, by a process of neglect, to ruin your food crops and let them revert to their primitive state of wildness. [ ... ] In political civilization, the state is an abstraction and the relationship of men utilitarian. Because it has no roots in sentiments, it is so dangerously easy to handle. Half a century has been enough for you to master this machine; and there are men among you, whose fondness for it exceeds their love for the living ideals which were born with the birth of your nation and nursed in your centuries. It is like a child who in the excitement of his play imagines he likes his playthings better than his mother. — Rabindranath Tagore

Although the primitive in art may be both interesting and impressive, as portrayed in American fiction it is conspicuous for dullness alone. Drab persons living drab lives, observed by drab minds and reported in drab writing ... — Ellen Glasgow

Without books we should very likely be a still-primitive people living in the shadow of traditions that faded with years until only a blur remained, and different memories would remember the past in different ways. A parent or a teacher has only his lifetime; a good book can teach forever.Without books we should very likely be a still-primitive people living in the shadow of traditions that faded with years until only a blur remained, and different memories would remember the past in different ways. A parent or a teacher has only his lifetime; a good book can teach forever. — Louis L'Amour

If you can't write freely and if you can't speak freely in your country, you can be sure that you are living in a very primitive country! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

The primitive ideals of centralization are now largely self-defeating. Human crucifixion by vertically on the now static checkerboard of the old city is pattern already in agony; yet for lack of any organic planing it is going on and on
not living, but rather hanging by its eyebrows from its nervous system. — Frank Lloyd Wright

God and Destiny are not against us, rather they are for us, they are the ones who never forget the things we have long forgotten, the ones who hear the desires of our heart that our own heads can't hear, and they are the ones who never forget who we really are, long after our minds have forgotten the images of who we are. We come from God and we belong to Destiny, yet for some reason of ignorance we think that to be the master of our own fates and the captain of our own souls means to write everything down on a paper and plan everything out on a grid! Such great things to be done, and we think they are accomplished by our primitive ways! No. We must only know what we want. And want what we want. And then fly high enough to see all that which we want that we couldn't yet see. — C. JoyBell C.

When we were on the farm, we were isolated, not just by geography but by the primitive living conditions: no electricity, no running water and, of course, no computer, no phone. — Sally Mann

In the beginning was the word, and primitive societies venerated poets second only to their leaders. A poet had the power to name and so to control; he was, literally, the living memory of a group or tribe who would perpetuate their history in song; his inspiration was god given and he was in effect a medium. — Kevin Crossley-Holland

In terms of their basic biochemical design ... no living system can be thought of as being primitive or ancestral with respect to any other system, nor is there the slightest empirical hint of an evolutionary sequence among all the incredibly diverse cells on earth. — Michael Denton

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

The notion of travelling to far places in order to study alien peoples and cultures, is unique to Western man; it springs from the predatory genius of the Greeks; no primitive peoples have ever come to study us. This is, on the one hand, a disinterested, intellectually inspired impulse. It is one of our glories. But it is, on the other, part and parcel of exploitation. [] The Western obsession with inquiry, with analysis, with the classification of all living forms, is itself a mode of subjugation, of psychological and technical mastery. — George Steiner

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

If we stand by the eagle, fish will die; if we stand by the fish, eagle will die! This dilemma has been created by the random evolutionary process. There is no goodness, there is no justice and there is no intelligence in here. We are living in a primitive and flawed order. — Mehmet Murat Ildan

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.

We know the original relation of the theater and the cult of the Dead: the first actors separated themselves from the community by playing the role of the Dead: to make oneself up was to designate oneself as a body simultaneously living and dead: the whitened bust of the totemic theater, the man with the painted face in the Chinese theater, the rice-paste makeup of the Indian Katha-Kali, the Japanese No mask ... Now it is this same relation which I find in the Photograph; however 'lifelike' we strive to make it (and this frenzy to be lifelike can only be our mythic denial of an apprehension of death), Photography is a kind of primitive theater, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead. — Roland Barthes

There is nothing sacred about convention; there is nothing sacred about primitive passions or whims; but the fact that a convention exists indicates that a way of living has been devised capable of maintaining itself. — George Santayana

I feel if theres one little thing I could do, its to make people realize: We are not worthless because we inhabit a country which is seen by Western eyes as a primitive, fundamentalist country only ... I mean, we are a rich mixture of all sorts of forces as well, and our lives are very much worth living. — Bapsi Sidhwa

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

The established religions no longer ask fundamental questions about our identity and our reason for living. Instead, they concentrate purely on a series of dogmas and rules concerned only with fitting in with a particular social and political organization. People in search of real spirituality are, therefore, setting off in new directions, and that inevitably means a return to the past and to primitive religions, before those religions were contaminated by the structures of power. — Paulo Coelho

For all my rational Western intellect and education, I was for the moment overwhelmed by a primitive sense of living in a world ordered by a malign and perverted god, and it coloured my view of everything that afternoon - even the coconuts. The villagers sold us some and split them open for us. They are almost perfectly designed. You first make a hole and drink the milk, and then you split open the nut with a machete and slice off a segment of the shell, which forms a perfect implement for scooping out the coconut flesh inside. What makes you wonder about the nature of this god character is that he creates something that is so perfectly designed to be of benefit to human beings and then hangs it twenty feet above their heads on a tree with no branches. — Douglas Adams

There is something living deep within us all that welcomes, even relishes, the role of victimhood for ourselves. There is no cause in the world more righteously embraced than our own when we feel someone has wronged us. Perhaps it is a psychological leftover from early childhood, when we felt the primeval terror of the world around us and yearned for the intervention of a mother/protector to keep us safe. Perhaps it makes it easier to explain away our personal failures when the work of an enemy can be blamed. Perhaps we just get tired of long explanations and like the cleanliness of an easy solution. It is for wiser people than me to say. Whatever its allure, this primitive ideology of Hutu Power swept through Rwanda in 1993 and early 1994 with the speed of flame through dry grass. — Paul Rusesabagina