Primitives Quotes & Sayings

We're all primitives underneath, that's why we had to invent God, to be the voice of our conscience, or we would be killing each other left, right and centre. — Kate Atkinson

Each one should become as it were a Christ to the other that we may be Christs to one another and Christ may be the same in all, that is, that we may be truly Christians. — Martin Luther

Yet none of these things [laws, justice, human rights, money] exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings. People easily understand that 'primitives' cement their social order by believing in ghosts and spirits, and gathering each full moon to dance together around the campfire. What we fail to appreciate is that our modern institutions function on exactly the same basis. Take for example the world of business corporations. Modern business-people and lawyers are, in fact, powerful sorcerers. The principal difference between them and tribal shamans is that modern lawyers tell far stranger stories. — Yuval Noah Harari

Only when we evolved as spirited stallions, with a strong will of our own, would we progress and leave the era of those primitives behind us. — Jean Sasson

In one such shop I saw lots of books in the window. I was reminded that humans have to read books. They actually need to sit down and look at each word consecutively. And that takes time. Lots of time. A human can't just swallow every book going, can't chew different tomes simultaneously, or gulp down near-infinite knowledge in a matter of seconds. They can't just pop a word-capsule in their mouth like we can. Imagine! Being not only mortal but also forced to take some of that precious and limited time and read. No wonder they were a species of primitives. By the time they had read enough books to actually reach a state of knowledge where they can do anything with it they are dead. — Matt Haig

Science is not simply a matter of observing the world, experimenting with its elements and drawing reasonable conclusions. Otherwise, we would have to recognize children, so-called primitives and a good many animals as excellent scientists. But the practical experiments carried out by all of us every day lack a few necessary factors, the first and most important of which is the concept of the universe as a single entity operating under universal, rational, knowable laws. Without this foundation, science cannot operate as such. — Wolfi Landstreicher

Sometimes you had to keep things from people just so they wouldn't do the first thing that came into their heads. — Jeff VanderMeer

Positively dealing with the unexpected by looking for solutions, not excuses, is the choice you need to make. — David Cottrell

So often among so-called "primitives" one comes across spiritual personalities who immediately inspire respect, as though they were the fully matured products of an undisturbed fate. — Carl Jung

Primitives of our own species, even today are historically shallow in their knowledge of the past. Only the poet who writes speaks his message across the millennia to other hearts. — Loren Eiseley

When we were on trees, others had lived in skies.
When we reach skies, descendant of primitives will someday convey this message. — Toba Beta

The Zulu is only outside the bars of a madhouse because there are no madhouses provided by his tribe ... primitives are far more aberrated than civilized peoples. Their savageness, their unprogressiveness, their incidence of illness ... — L. Ron Hubbard

We are infinitely more than our limitations and afflictions. — Jeffrey R. Holland

I know what you must be thinking: What a bitch. And you'll get no argument from me on that one. I was pretty messed up back then. I loved Elias with all my head, and that scared the hell out of me.
But I should get something out of the way before I dive into the excuses of why I was the way I was. I'm sure Elias sugarcoated me with his bias and all, but if this story is going to be told, then it needs to be told in its truth and entirety, without Band-Aids and training wheels.
I was fucked up. — J.A. Redmerski

I am a very lucky man. I am living my life with my hobby as my profession. — Jim Sullivan

They are the gateway for our modern esthetic development, the prophets of the new time. They are most of all, the primitives of the way they have begun; they have voiced most of all the imperative need of essential personalism, of direct expression of direct experience. — Marsden Hartley

There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings. People easily understand that 'primitives' cement their social order by believing in ghosts and spirits, and gathering each full moon to dance together around the campfire. What we fail to appreciate is that our modern institutions function on exactly the same basis. Take — Yuval Noah Harari

Nothing evokes the end of the world more than a man running straight ahead on a beach, swathed in the sounds of his walkman ... Primitives, when in despair, would commit suicide by swimming out to sea until they could swim no longer. The jogger commits suicide by running up and down the beach. His eyes are wild, saliva drips from his mouth. Do not stop him. — Jean Baudrillard

It has long been noticed that juries are pitiless for robbery and full of indulgence for infanticide. A question of interest, my dear Sir! The jury is afraid of being robbed and has passed the age when it could be a victim of infanticide. — Edmond Francois Valentin About

Why do we tend to treasure our health best, only when it is in jeopardy? — Toni Sorenson

Cruelty links all three primitives [pleasure, pain, and desire]: Spinoza defines it as the desire to inflict pain on someone we love or pity. Financial speaking, cruelty is analogous to a convertible bond whose debt and equity depend on three economic underliers: the stock price, the level of interest rates, and the credit worthiness of the company's debt. — Emanuel Derman

If you don't succeed at first, there's no need for the F word (Failure). Pick yourself up and try, try again. — Richard Branson

We are in a far better position to observe instincts in animals or in primitives than in ourselves. This is due to the fact that we have grown accustomed to scrutinizing our own actions and to seeking rational explanations for them. — Carl Jung

In Paul Friedrich's book Proto-Indo-European Trees he identifies the "semantic primitives" of the Indo-European tribe of languages through a group of words that have not changed much through twelve thousand years - and those are tree names: especially birch, willow, adler, elm, ash, apple and beech (bher, wyt, alysos, ulmo, os, abul, bhago). Seed syllables, bija, of the life of the west. — Gary Snyder

That was the way with grief: it left you alone for months together until you thought that you were cured, and then without warning it blotted out the sunlight. — Josephine Tey

People easily understand that 'primitives' cement their social order by believing in ghosts and spirits, and gathering each full moon to dance together around the campfire. What we fail to appreciate is that our modern institutions function on exactly the same basis. — Yuval Noah Harari

The most awkward means are adequate to the communication of authentic experience, and the finest words no compensation for lack of it. It is for this reason that we are moved by the true Primitives and that the most accomplished art craftsmanship leaves us cold. — Ananda Coomaraswamy

Besides, often at difficult moments you'll catch yourself talking to the mountain, flattering it, cursing it, making promises or threats. And you will have the impression that the mountain answers you if you speak to it properly - by becoming gentler, more submissive. Don't think the less of yourself for that; don't be ashamed of behaving like those our specialists call primitives and animists. Just keep in mind, when you remember these moments later on, that your dialogue with nature was just the outward image of an inner dialogue with yourself. — Rene Daumal

Consciousness naturally resists anything unconscious and unknown. I have already pointed out the existence among primitive peoples of what anthropologists call "misoneism," a deep and superstitious fear of novelty. The primitives manifest all the reactions of the wild animal against untoward events. But "civilized" man reacts to new ideas in much the same way, erecting psychological barriers to protect himself from the shock of facing something new. — C. G. Jung

It was the combination of EC2 and S3 - storage and compute, two primitives linked together - that transformed both AWS and the technology world. Startups no longer needed to spend their venture capital on buying servers and hiring specialized engineers to run them. Infrastructure costs were variable instead of fixed, and they could grow in direct proportion to revenues. It freed companies to experiment, to change their business models with a minimum of pain, and to keep up with the rapidly growing audiences of erupting social networks like Facebook and Twitter. — Brad Stone

It is often simply from lack of creative imagination that we do not go far enough in suffering. — Marcel Proust

The fact that the same symbolic programming primitives work for those as work for math kinds of things, I think, really validates the idea of symbolic programming being something pretty general. — Stephen Wolfram

Americans resent the vagaries of weather to a degree unknown to other peoples ... Weather is a force we have lost touch with. We feel entitled to dominate it, like everything else in the environment, and when we can't are more panic-stricken than primitives who know that when nature is out of control they can only pray to the gods. — Eleanor Perenyi

We have also obtained a glimpse of another crucial idea about languages and program design. This is the approach of statified design, the notion that a complex system should be structured as a sequence of levels that are described using a sequence of languages. Each level is constructed by combining parts that are regarded as primitive at that level, and the parts constructed at each level are used as primitives at the next level. The language used at each level of a stratified design has primitives, means of combination, and means of abstraction appropriate to that level of detail. — Hal Abelson

and doctrinairism are the disease of our time; they pretend to have all the answers."44 Where primitives identify themselves with the world itself, moderns identify themselves with the part of them that controls the world: the ego. — C. G. Jung

My inspiration comes from so many things, it is hard to give credit to one. I find music of all kinds to be a great inspiration. A melody or a lyric can fire my imagination. Exercise is another. Endorphins fuel my thoughts - I tend to work out scenes and dialogue when I am exercising. Reading is also a great inspiration. — Julia London

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

The dietaries of the various primitive groups have all been shown to have a mineral content several times higher than that which obtains in the inadequate food eaten by modernized primitives and the people of our modernized cultures — Anonymous

There are beautiful sounds in rock. Very lazy, dreamlike noises. You can forget about the lyrics in most songs. Just dig the noise, and you've got your sound ... We're musical primitives. — Andy Warhol

I wish I could catch the words and reel them back in my mouth to safely store away in my Shut the Hell Up, You Idiot file. — Katie Kacvinsky

On the mainland, a rain was falling. The famous Seattle rain. The thin, gray rain that toadstools love. The persistent rain that knows every hidden entrance into collar and shopping bag. The quiet rain that can rust a tin roof without the tin roof making a sound in protest. The shamanic rain that feeds the imagination. The rain that seems actually a secret language, whispering, like the ecstasy of primitives, of the essence of things. — Tom Robbins

I was failed in all other aspects of filmmaking and was completely bankrupt because my dreams were higher than realities. So I started my acting school in a small room with 12 students to prepare future actors and actresses. — Anupam Kher