Primitive Man Quotes:

By nature, by necessity itself, [primitive man] is encyclopedic, while civilized man finds himself confined in the infinitely small regions of specialization.

- Charles Baudelaire

topic: Knowledge, Men, Primitive Man, Specialization, Regions

To play with baubles is our ambition, not to deal with grave questions in a spirit of serious energy. But while we are playing with baubles, with our Legislative Councils, our Simultaneous Examinations, our ingenious schemes for separating the judicial from the executive functions, - while we, I say, are finessing about trifles, the waters of the great deep are being stirred and that surging chaos of the primitive man over which our civilised societies are superimposed on a thin crust of convention, is being strangely and ominously agitated.

- Sri Aurobindo

source: "New Lamps for Old". Nine articles by Sri Aurobindo in the "Indu Prakash" (a Bombay daily newspaper), December 4, 1893.

topic: Ambition, Men, Primitive Man, Civilised Society, Civilised

Financiers are great mythomaniacs, their explanations and superstitions are those of primitive men; the world is a jungle to them.They perceive acutely that they are at the dawn of economic history.

- Christina Stead

source: Christina Stead (2012). “House of All Nations”, p.122, Open Road Media

topic: Men, Primitive Man, Dawn, Economic History, Financiers

It is always the individual who thinks. Society does not think any more than it eats or drinks. The evolution of human reasoning from the naive thinking of primitive man to the more subtle thinking of modern science took place within society. However, thinking itself is always an achievement of individuals.

- Ludwig von Mises

source: Ludwig Von Mises (1963). “Human action: a treatise on economics”

topic: Men, Thinking, Primitive Man, Modern Science

There can be no doubt ... of our dependence upon forces beyond our control. Primitive man was so impotent in the face of these forces that g , especially in an unfavorable natural environment, fear became a dominant attitude, and, as the old saying goes, fear created gods.

- John Dewey

topic: Attitude, Men, Primitive Man

The conception of gods originated in fear and curiosity. Primitive man, unable to understand the phenomena of nature, and harassed by them, saw in every terrifying manifestation some sinister force expressly directed against him; and as ignorance and fear are the parents of all superstition, the troubled fancy of primitive man wove the God idea.

- Emma Goldman

source: Emma Goldman (1915). “Mother Earth, a Monthly Magazine Devoted to the Social Science and Literature”

topic: Ignorance, Men, Primitive Man, Conception, Ignorance And Fear

What is conserved in the ground? Stone, bronze, ivory, bone, sometimes pottery. Never wood objects, no fabric or skins. That completely skews our notions about primitive man.

- Pablo Picasso

source: Source: www.americansuburbx.com

topic: Men, Primitive Man, Ivory, Pottery

The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the power of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the rank of devoutly religious men.

- Albert Einstein

topic: Beautiful, God, Religious, Awe And Wonder, Wonder And Mystery

When primitive man heard thunder or saw the lightning, he could not account for either, and therefore concluded that back of them must be a force greater than himself. Similarly he saw a supernatural force in the rain, and in the various other changes in nature.

- Emma Goldman

source: Emma Goldman (2015). “Anarchism and Other Essays”, p.97, Library of Alexandria

topic: Rain, Men, Supernatural Forces, Primitive Man

The consideration of human suffering is not one which enters into the calculations of primitive man.

- James G. Frazer

topic: Men, Suffering, Consideration, Calculations, Primitive Man

Sculpture is, in the twentieth century, a wide field of experience, with many facets of symbol and material and individual calligraphy. But in all these varied and exciting extensions of our experience we always come back tot the fact that we are human beings of such and such a size, biologically the same as primitive man, and that it is through drawing and observing, or observing and drawing, that we equate our bodies with our landscape.

- Barbara Hepworth

source: Studio International 171, p. 280, June 1966.

topic: Men, Drawing, Sculpture, Calligraphy, Twentieth Century

Human beings are born with the instinct to express themselves through movement. Even before he could communicate with words, primitive man was dancing to the beat of his own heart.

- Bob Fosse

topic: Dance, Heart, Men, Primitive Man

We are primitive men; we taboo what we desire and need. How did the denying of love come to be associated with the idea of morality.

- Christina Stead

topic: Love, Men, Ideas, Primitive Man

Just as primitive man believed himself to stand face to face with demons and believed that could he but know their names he would become their master, so is contemporary man faced by this incomprehensible, which disorders his calculations. "If I can but grasp it, if I can but cognise it", so he thinks, "I can make it my servant.

- Karl Jaspers

topic: Men, Thinking, Names, Primitive Man

Modern man uses ideas and persuasion to achieve his goals; primitive man uses guns and brute force to achieve his goals! Moral and clever people choose the first method; immoral and stupid people choose the second method!

- Mehmet Murat Ildan

topic: Clever, Stupid, Gun, Modern Man, Primitive Man

If we can combine our knowledge of science with the wisdom of wildness, if we can nurture civilization through roots in the primitive, man's potentialities appear to be unbounded, Through this evolving awareness, and his awareness of that awareness, he can emerge with the miraculous-to which we can attach what better name than 'God'? And in this merging, as long sensed by intuition but still only vaguely perceived by rationality, experience may travel without need for accompanying life.

- Charles Lindbergh

topic: God, Wisdom, Science, Primitive Man

We are so accustomed to the apparently rational nature of our world that we can scarcely imagine anything happening that cannot be explained by common sense. The primitive man confronted by a shock of this kind would not doubt his sanity; he would think of fetishes, spirits or gods

- Carl Jung

topic: Men, Thinking, Our World, Primitive Man, Fetish

Wherever primitive man put up a word, he believed he had made a discovery. How utterly mistaken he really was! He had touched a problem, and while supposing he had solved it, he had created and obstacle to its solution. Now, with every new knowledge we stumble over flint-like and petrified words and, in so doing, break a leg sooner than a word.

- Friedrich Nietzsche

topic: Men, Break A Leg, Discovery, Supposing, Primitive Man

If we put together all that we have learned from anthropology and ethnography about primitive men and primitive society, we perceive that the first task of life is to live. Men begin with acts, not with thoughts.

- William Graham Sumner

topic: Life, Men, Together, Anthropology, Ethnography

Labels are for the things men make, not for men. The most primitive man is too complex to be labeled.

- Rex Stout

topic: Men, Labels, Primitive, Primitive Man

Death is not regarded as a natural affair by primitive man. Death is believed to be due to the intervention of some malevolent or at least not well disposed power. Normally it should not take place. So we have all through history crude explanations of death, as e.g., the influence of the serpent, the devil, sin.

- Joseph Alexander Leighton

source: Joseph Alexander Leighton (1918). “The Field of Philosophy: An Outline of Lectures on Introduction to Philosophy”

topic: Men, Devil, Influence, Primitive Man

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

topic: Son, Men, Thinking, Primitive Man, Crafty

Most of the vices and mortal sins condemned today correspond to inclinations that were purely adaptive or at least harmless in primitive man

- Konrad Lorenz

topic: Men, Vices, Today, Primitive Man, Mortal Sin

The only information we have about the early history of the dance comes to us from the rock paintings created by primitive man tens of thousands of years ago in what is now France.

- Curt Sachs

topic: Dance, Men, Rocks, Primitive Man

The origins of clothing are not practical. They are mystical and erotic. The primitive man in the wolf-pelt was not keeping dry; he was saying: Look what I killed. Aren't I the best?

- Katharine Hamnett

topic: Men, Looks, Dry, Primitive Man

So the lion is the law-breaker. Just as to the primitive man the lion is the lawbreaker, the great nuisance, dangerous to human beings and to animals, that breaks into the Kraal at night and fetches the bull out of the herd: he is the destructive instinct.

- Carl Jung

topic: Night, Men, Animal, Law Breakers, Primitive Man

It is the simple truth that man does differ from the brutes in kind and not in degree; and the proof of it is here; that it sounds like a truism to say that the most primitive man drew a picture of a monkey and that it sounds like a joke to say that the most intelligent monkey drew a picture of a man. Something of division and disproportion has appeared; and it is unique. Art is the signature of man.

- Gilbert K. Chesterton

source: "The Everlasting Man". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, Part I: On the Creature Called Man, 1925.

topic: Art, Intelligent, Unique, Truism, Primitive Man