Primitive Urges Quotes

Sometimes, humanity surprises me with all its lack of control over the primordial urges. These innate urges are the biological traits that make us similar to the rest of the animal kingdom. But the modern qualities that make us superior to all the animals are intellect and self-control. ~ Abhijit Naskar

From the perspective of a general human being – a non-scientist, the most valuable element of the human mental life, is Emotion – a tiny portion of our conscious mental world. We humans as a species crave for emotional stimulation. And in many cases, as it happens, we are actually slaves to our emotions. ~ Abhijit Naskar

Regardless of all our pretenses, deep within, we are still unconsciously the same old cave-people. ~ Abhijit Naskar

She--the unnamed lady--simply drew his hands to the Paleolithic places men always have grown tumid from feeling, like the outward cradle of the hips within which a fetus will reside and her breasts that will nourish it, once born. ~ Edward Hoagland

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

An empirical philosophy is in any case a kind of intellectual disrobing. We cannot permanently divest ourselves of the intellectual habits we take on and wear when we assimilate the culture of our own time and place. But intelligent furthering of culture demands that we take some of them off, that we inspect them critically to see what they are made of and what wearing them does to us. We cannot achieve recovery of primitive naïveté. But there is attainable a cultivated naïveté of eye, ear and thought. ~ John Dewey

If you want to know why the human primate behaves the way it does, I can easily explain:

1. human life span
2. human physiology at each stage of life="hormones"
3. our current state of evolution (still primitive in many ways).

Humans are the only species on earth aware of their own deaths. They aren't here for long so they are very concerned with the quality of their lives more so than the quality of the lives that will come after them. It is our life spans that trap us, make us truly incapable of long-term decisions which would require sacrifice we as a species are not willing to make.

Hormones: at each life stage, we are influenced heavily by hormones-raging levels in the young male or not, descending in the middle aged man or woman. Hormones also influence our behavior.

Lastly, we are not out of the oven yet as far as evolution goes, still prone to settle our differences through primitive means--greed and violence.

Here is a thought question for you-how would things differ if the average human could expect to live 200 years instead of 70+-? ~ Virginia Arthur

You have become what you are through countless lives and lessons. There is something you can offer others; if only working on your self-discipline, fighting your own baser urges.
Do that then. Do what is offered. Learn and grow as you can.
That in itself is service. ~ Edward Fahey

I have the urge to still be part of the world, the universe, of life. Through music I have the feeling that I come a little closer to that. ~ Dave Gahan

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

Not by the Platonic device of uniting the strong and fair with the strong and fair, regardless of sentiment and morality, nor yet by his other device of combining dissimilar natures (Statesman), have mankind gradually passed from the brutality and licentiousness of primitive marriage to marriage Christian and civilized. Few ~ Plato

Kahlil Gibran said, "When you are born, your work is placed in your heart." So, what is your work? Your purpose? Are you living it out the way your heart urges you to? ~ Wayne W. Dyer

The Hawaiian Islands were discovered by hardy Polynesian sailors, who crossed thousands of miles of open ocean in primitive canoes, braving violent storm-tossed seas for months at a time. My family and I arrived by modern commercial aviation, which was infinitely worse. ~ Dave Barry

What does drunkenness not accomplish? It unlocks secrets, confirms our hopes, urges the indolent into battle, lifts the burden from anxious minds, teaches new arts. ~ Horace

I urge you to be as impudent as you dare. BE BOLD, BE BOLD, BE BOLD. ~ Susan Sontag

[The Albanians] seem to be rather backward and primitive people ... they can be as faithful as a dog; that is one of the traits of the primitive. Our Chuvash were the same. The Russian tsars always used them for their bodyguards. ~ Joseph Stalin

Buck goes through a certain retrogression which brings him back to a more primitive state ~ Hunton

She came and then he was coming with her, his c#ck pumping inside her, his rhythm wild and frantic. His hands held her, gripped her. His moans became something else, something primitive and primal. The sound of utter release and absolute pleasure. The very sounds falling from her lips in shallow, moaning cries of surrender. ~ Lexxie Couper

Through the din and desultoriness of noon, even in the most Oriental city, is seen the fresh and primitive and savage nature, in which Scythians and Ethiopians and Indians dwell. What is echo, what are light and shade, day and night, ocean and stars, earthquake and eclipse, there? The works of man are everywhere swallowed up in the immensity of nature. The AEgean Sea is but Lake Huron still to the Indian. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Sylvester Graham, he of the eponymous health-food cracker, claimed that a man who could make it to the age of thirty without giving in to the temptations of his sexual urges would be a veritable god. ~ Hanne Blank

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

To-day all our novels and newspapers will be found to be swarming with numberless allusions to the popular character called a Cave-Man. He seems to be quite familiar to us, not only as a public character but as a private character. His psychology is seriously taken into account in psychological fiction and psychological medicine. So far as I can understand, his chief occupation in life was knocking his wife about, or treating women in general with what is, I believe, known in the world of the film as 'rough stuff.' I have never happeend to come upon the evidence for this idea; and I do not know on what primitive diaries or prehistoric divorce-reports it is founded. Nor, as I have explained elsewhere, have I ever been able to see the probability of it, even considered a priori. We are always told without any explanation or authority that primitive man waved a club and knocked the woman down before he carried her off. But on every animal analogy, it would seem an almost morbid modesty and reluctance, on the part of the lady, always to insist on being knocked down before consenting to be carried off. And I repeat that I can never comprehend why, when the male was so very rude, the female should have been so very refined. The cave-man may have been a brute, but there is no reason why he should have been more brutal than the brutes. And the loves of the giraffes and the river romances of the hippopotami are affected without any of this preliminary fracas or shindy. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Playing the cello did feel nicely neolithic, or at least a civilized way to process the primitive. ~ Eric Siblin

In ordinary perception, the senses send an overwhelming flood of information to the brain, which the brain then filters down to a trickle it can manage for the purpose of survival in a highly competitive world. Man has become so rational, so utilitarian, that the trickle becomes most pale and thin. It is efficient, for mere survival, but it screens out the most wondrous parts of man's potential experience without his even knowing it. We're shut off from our own world. Primitive man once experienced the rich and sparkling flood of the senses fully. Children experience it for a few months-until "normal" training, conditioning, close the doors on this other world, usually for good. Somehow, the drugs opened these ancient doors. And through them modern man may at last go, and rediscover his divine birthright ... ~ Tom Wolfe

I'm not a pessimist. Maybe I don't have a primitive feeling of happiness, that is true. Sometimes my color is happy but not the expression. ~ Karel Appel

And I think that it is certainly possible that the objective universe can be affected by the poet. I mean, you recall Orpheus made the trees and the stones dance and so forth, and this is something which is in almost all primitive cultures. I think it has some definite basis to it. I'm not sure what. It's like telekinesis, which I know very well on a pinball machine is perfectly possible. ~ Jack Spicer

I keep having the urge to cross my hands over my chest, to cover up my breasts, to hide. I'm suddenly aware of how pale I look in the sunshine, and how many moles I have spotting up and down my chest, and I just know he's looking at me thinking i'm wrong or deformed. But the he breathes, 'Beautiful' and when his eyes meet mine I know that he really, truly means it. ~ Lauren Oliver

The Bible is a collection of honorable, but primitive legends which are still nevertheless pretty childish. ~ Albert Einstein

There are things in this world most of us never see," I find myself saying. "We've trained ourselves not to see them, or try to pretend we didn't if we do. But there's a reason why, no matter how sophisticated or primitive, every religion has demons. ~ Andrew Pyper

Now the thought
Both of lost happiness and lasting pain
Torments him; round he throws his baleful eyes
That witnessed huge affliction and dismay
Mixed with obdurate pride and steadfast hate:
At once as far as angels ken he views
The dismal situation waste and wild,
A dungeon horrible, on all sides round
As one great furnace flamed, yet from those flames
No light, but rather darkness visible
Served only to discover sights of woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
That comes to all; but torture without end
Still urges, and a fiery deluge, fed
With ever-burning sulfur unconsumed. ~ John Milton

There was no reason to deny humans the benefits of human civilisation, no matter what warlords, kings, emperors and even elected politicians thought about it. A society so primitive that it used gold as a means of exchange and practised the slave trade, didn't deserve to exist. ~ Christopher G. Nuttall

With our technologies
ones of incalcuable power: earth-restoring, planet preserving
we can rediscover an intimacy, a mutuality with the natural world, that is not primitive (though based in part on fear), but knowing. It might even be possible to relearn a life of awe. And inhabit the landscape without violation. With the least violation. ~ Janet Kauffman

Only in time of fear is government thrown back to its primitive and sole function of self-defense and the many interests of which it is the guardian become subordinate to that. ~ Jane Addams

The Croft
East Dene, Sussex


August 11th, 1922


My dear Watson,

I have taken our discussion of this afternoon to heart, considered it carefully, and am prepared to modify my previous opinions.
I am amenable to your publishing your account of the incidents of 1903, specifically of the final case before my retirement, under the following conditions.
In addition to the usual changes that you would make to disguise actual people and places, I would suggest that you replace the entire scenario we encountered (I speak of Professor Presbury's garden. I shall not write of it further here) with monkey glands, or a similar extract from the testes of an ape or lemur, sent by some foreign mystery-man. Perhaps the monkey-extract could have the effect of making Professor Presbury move like an ape - he could be some kind of "creeping man," perhaps? - or possibly make him able to clamber up the sides of buildings and up trees. I would suggest that he grow a tail, but this might be too fanciful even for you, Watson, although no more fanciful than many of the rococo additions you have made in your histories to otherwise humdrum events in my life and work.
In addition, I have written the following speech, to be delivered by myself, at the end of your narrative. Please make certain that something much like this is there, in which I inveigh against living too long, and the foolish urges that push foolish people to do foolish things t ~ Neil Gaiman

Public emergencies may require the hand of severity to fall heavily on those who are not personally guilty, but compassion prompts, and ever urges to milder methods. ~ Mercy Otis Warren

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

Life is agid, life is fulgid. Life is what the least of us make most of us feel the least of us make the most of. Life is a burgeoning, a quickening of the dim primordial urge in the murky wastes of time. ~ Willard Van Orman Quine

1. Sovereignty of the human will; in short, despotism. 2. Inequality of wealth and rank. 3. Property - above JUSTICE, always invoked as the guardian angel of sovereigns, nobles, and proprietors; JUSTICE, the general, primitive, categorical law of all society.
We must ascertain whether the ideas of despotism, civil inequality and property, are in harmony with the primitive notion of justice, and necessarily follow from it, - assuming various forms according to the condition, position, and relation of persons; or whether they are not rather the illegitimate result of a confusion of different things, a fatal association of ideas. And since justice deals especially with the questions of government, the condition of persons, and the possession of things, we must ascertain under what conditions, judging by universal opinion and the progress of the human mind, government is just, the condition of citizens is just, and the possession of things is just; then, striking out every thing which fails to meet these conditions, the result will at once tell us what legitimate government is, what the legitimate condition of citizens is, and what the legitimate possession of things is; and finally, as the last result of the analysis, what justice is. ~ Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

If I trace its breaking point I come across the eternity of the primitive impulse. The sea river is a cold impasse. Will I find secrets there? In my dream I am standing on a frozen lake, the second sex and I can hear female voices all around me. ~ Abigail George

Seizing and incorporating ... There is nothing about us which is more strongly primitive. [p. 203] ~ Elias Canetti

The skylines lit up at dead of night, the air-conditioning systems cooling empty hotels in the desert and artificial light in the middle of the day all have something both demented and admirable about them. The mindless luxury of a rich civilization, and yet of a civilization perhaps as scared to see the lights go out as was the hunter in his primitive night. ~ Jean Baudrillard

Freedom in society is gauged by our success in getting what we want and conditioned by status and power, by race, class and gender. In the internal world of the psyche, however, freedom means something very different. It is the ability to opt for our long-term physical and spiritual well-being as opposed to our immediate urges. Absent that ability, any talk of 'free will' or 'choice' becomes nearly meaningless. ~ Gabor Mate

The shop for fuller figures could be seen through broad, green leaves, its windows full, not of dresses, but fat zeros, pot-bellied legless sixes and bosomy eights, and threes like pregnant, primitive goddesses. In the teashop the chairs were being stood on top of the tables and made a forest of their own, sprouting upwards in fountains of coloured leaves. ~ Margaret Mahy

Instead of saying that all gender is this or all gender id that, let's recognize that the word gender has scores of meanings built into it. It's an amalgamation of bodies, identities, and life experiences, subconscious urges, sensations, and behaviours, some of which develop organically, and others which are shaped by language and culture. Instead of saying that gender is any one single thing, let's start describing it as a holistic experience. ~ Kate Bornstein S. Bear Bergman

I don't really think our government at heart wants peace. So I urge you, write to Mrs. Laura Bush, because she reads. ~ Sandra Cisneros

I suppose that writers should, in a way, feel flattered by the censorship laws. They show a primitive fear and dread at the fearful magic of print. ~ John Mortimer

A mouse who wishes to fool the cat doesn't simply scamper out of its hole whenever it feels the slightest urge. ~ Arthur Golden

Mythology is a set of primitive lies that people rarely believe. This is rather different from history, which is a set of lies that people actually believe. ~ Ashwin Sanghi

If you don't have to write songs, why write them? I've got enough where I don't really feel the urge to write anything additional. ~ Bob Dylan

At Chicago I read again 'Philip Van Artevelde,' and certain passages in it will always be in my mind associated with the deep sound of the lake, as heard in the night. I used to read a short time at night, and then open the blind to look out. The moon would be full upon the lake, and the calm breath, pure light, and the deep voice, harmonized well with the thought of the Flemish hero. When will this country have such a man ? It is what she needs - no thin Idealist, no coarse Realist, but a man whose eye reads the heavens while his feet step firmly on the ground and his hands are strong and dextrous in the use of human instruments. A man, religious, virtuous and - sagacious; a man of universal sympathies, but self-possessed; a man who knows the region of emotion, though he is not its slave; a man to whom this world is no mere spectacle or fleeting shadow, but a great, solemn game, to be played with good heed, for its stakes are of eternal value, yet who, if his own play be true, heeds not what he loses by the falsehood of others. A man who lives from the past, yet knows that its honey can but moderately avail him; whose comprehensive eye scans the present, neither infatuated by its golden lures nor chilled by its many ventures; who possesses prescience, as the wise man must, but not so far as to be driven mad to-day by the gift which discerns to-morrow. When there is such a man for America, the thought which urges her on will be expressed. ~ Margaret Fuller

Like punch through the brick wall he'd built around himself and give in to the sudden, desperate urges to touch, to taste, to feel. Krista Fucking Slater. Of all the women in the world, why was she the only one who managed to remind him he was still alive in a way no one had been able to in three long years? ~ Jami Alden