Primeval Quotes

1. "Puszcza, an old Polish word, means "forest primeval." Straddling the border between Poland and Belarus, the half-million acres of the Bialowieza Puszcza contain Europe's last remaining fragment of old-growth, lowland wilderness."
Author: Alan Weisman

2. "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of men: when the forces of nature were still untamed, the Powers that may have haunted a primeval universe not yet withdrawn.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")"
Author: Algernon Blackwood

3. "The whole blear worldof smoke and twisted steelaround my head in a railroadcar, and my mind wanderingpast the rust into futurity:I saw the sun go downin a carnal and primevalworld, leaving darknessto cover my railroad trainbecause the other side of theworld was waiting for dawn."
Author: Allen Ginsberg

4. "The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard."
Author: Barbara Tuchman

5. "The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach."
Author: C.G. Jung

6. "There were two forests for every one you entered. There was the one you walked in, the physical echo, and then there was the one that was connected to all the other forests, with no consideration of distance, or time. The forest primeval, remembered through the collective memory of every tree in the same way that people remembered myth- through the collective subconscious that Jung mapped, the shared mythic resonance that lay buried in every human mind. Legend and myth, all tangled in an alphabet of trees remembered, not always with understanding, but with wonder. With awe."
Author: Charles De Lint

7. "I think that women just have a primeval instinct to make soup, which they will try to foist on anybody who looks like a likely candidate."
Author: Dylan Moran

8. "...is a pale desert of gigantic water-lilies. They sigh one unto the other in that solitude. And stretch towards the heaven their long and ghastly necks. And nod to and fro their everlasting heads. And there is an indistinct murmur which cometh out from among them like the rushing of subterrene water. And they sigh unto the other... And the tall primeval trees rock eternally hither and thither with a crashing and mighty sound. And from their high summits, one by one, drop everlasting dews. And at the roots strange poisonous flowers lie writhing in perturbed slumber. And overhead, with a rustling loud noise, the gray clouds rush westwardly forever, until they roll, a cataract, over the fiery wall of the horizon..."
Author: Edgar Allan Poe

9. "Hundreds of thousands of years ago our ancestors of the dim and distant past faced the same problems which we must face, possibly in these same primeval forests. That we are here today evidences their victory.What they did may we not do? And even better, for are we not armed with ages of superior knowledge, and have we not the means of protection, defense, and sustenance which science has given us, but of which they were totally ignorant? What they accomplished, Alice, with instruments and weapons of stone and bone, surely that may we accomplish also."
Author: Edgar Rice Burroughs

10. "Benedicto: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you -- beyond that next turning of the canyon walls."
Author: Edward Abbey

11. "We have not been created out of nothing, but from primeval "ur-matter," atoms formed billions of years ago that have for a brief while been gathered into collections that think they are us."
Author: Frank Close

12. "Ages of happiness. - An age of happiness is quite impossible, because men want only to desire it but not to have it, and every individual who experiences good times learns to downright pray for misery and disquietude. The destiny of man is designed for happy moments - every life has them - but not for happy ages. Nonetheless they will remain fixed in the imagination of man as 'the other side of the hill' because they have been inherited from ages past: for the concepts of the age of happiness was no doubt acquired in primeval times from that condition of which, after violent exertion in hunting and warfare, man gives himself up to repose, stretches his limbs and hears the pinions of sleep rustling about him. It is a false conclusion if, in accordance with that ancient familiar experience, man imagines that, after whole ages of toil and deprivation, he can then partake of that condition of happiness correspondingly enhanced and protracted."
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

13. "The three great elemental sounds in nature are the sound of rain, the sound of wind in a primeval wood, and the sound of outer ocean on a beach."
Author: Henry Beston

14. "There are other, savager, and more primeval aspects of Nature than our poets have sung. It is only white man's poetry. Homer and Ossian even can never revive in London or Boston. And yet behold how these cities are refreshed by the mere tradition, or the imperfectly transmitted fragance and flavor of these wild fruits. If we could listen but for an instant to the chaunt of the Indian muse, we should understand why he will not exchange his savageness for civilization. Nations are not whimsical. Steel and blankets are strong temptations; but the Indian does well to continue Indian."
Author: Henry David Thoreau

15. "Still stands the forest primeval; but far away from its shadow, Side by side, in their nameless graves, the lovers are sleeping.Under the humble walls of the little catholic churchyard,In the heart of the city, they lie, unknown and unnoticed;Daily the tides of life go ebbing and flowing beside them,Thousands of throbbing hearts, where theirs are at rest and forever,Thousands of aching brains, where theirs no longer are busy,Thousands of toiling hands, where theirs have ceased from their labors,Thousands of weary feet, where theirs have completed their journey!"
Author: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

16. "Keb and Nut were the father and mother of the four divinities, Osiris and Isis, Set and Nephthys; together they formed with their primeval father the sun-god, a circle of nine deities, the "ennead" of which each temple later possessed a local form. This correlation of the primitive divinities as father, mother and son, strongly influenced the theology of later times until each temple possessed an artificially created triad, of purely secondary origin, upon which an "ennead" was then built up."
Author: James Henry Breasted

17. "Beauty is a primeval phenomenon. It never makes an appearance itself, but is a visible reflection in a thousand different utterances of the creative mind. It is as various as nature herself."
Author: Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

18. "It always gave Wolf a peculiar thrill thus to tighten his grip upon his stick, thus to wrap himself more closely in his faded overcoat. Objects of this kind played a queer part in his secret life-illusion. His stick was like a plough-handle, a ship's runner, a gun, a spade, a sword, a spear. His threadbare overcoat was like a medieval jerkin, like a monk's habit, like a classic toga! It gave him a primeval delight merely to move one foot in front of the other, merely to prod the ground with his stick, merely to feel the flapping of his coat about his knees, when this mood predominated. It always associated itself with his consciousness of the historic continuity---so incredibly charged with marvels of dreamy fancy---of human beings moving to and fro across the earth. It associated itself, too, with his deep, obstinate quarrel with modern inventions, with modern machinery...."
Author: John Cowper Powys

19. "...; the chipped plates might have been disinterred from some kitchen midden near an inhabited lake; and the chops recalled times more ancient still. They brought forcibly to one's mind the night of ages when the primeval man, evolving the first rudiments of cookery from his dim consciousness, scorched lumps of flesh at a fire of sticks..."
Author: Joseph Conrad

20. "And no, it wasn't shame I now felt, or guilt, but something rarer in my life and stronger than both: remorse. A feeling which is more complicated, curdled, and primeval. Whose chief characteristic is that nothing can be done about it: too much time has passed, too much damage has been done, for amends to be made."
Author: Julian Barnes

21. "The Formless WayWe look at it, and do not see it; it is invisible.We listen to it, and do not hear it; it is inaudible.We touch it, and do not feel it; it is intangible.These three elude our inquiries, and hence merge into one.Not by its rising, is it bright,nor by its sinking, is it dark.Infinite and eternal, it cannot be defined.It returns to nothingness.This is the form of the formless, being in non-being.It is nebulous and elusive.Meet it, and you do not see its beginning.Follow it, and you do not see its end.Stay with the ancient Wayin order to master what is present.Knowing the primeval beginning is the essence of the Way."
Author: Lao Tzu

22. "Dawkins mentioned two mechanisms: the theory of the ‘primeval soup' and the Cairns-Smith theory. He discussed the latter in some detail. Since no one has computed, for either theory, the chances of the events occurring, Dawkins could not tell us what those chances are. The mechanisms of both theories, however, have every appearance of being very improbably – even to the point of being impossible."
Author: Lee Spetner

23. "This, I believe, is the appropriate image of human intercourse -- appropriate because it recognizes the qualities, the diversities, and the proper relationships of human utterances. As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves."
Author: Michael Oakeshott

24. "What we now want most is closer contact and better understanding between individuals and communities all over the earth and the elimination of that fanatic devotion to exalted ideals of national egoism and pride, which is always prone to plunge the world into primeval barbarism and strife."
Author: Nikola Tesla

25. "Below the mill the rivers merge. First they flow close beside each other, undecided, overawed by their longed-for intimacy, and then they fall into each other and get lost in one another. The river that flows out of this melting pot by the mill is no longer either the White or the Black, but it is powerful and effortlessly drives the mill wheel that grinds the grain for bread.Primeval lies on both the White and Black rivers and also on the third one, formed out of their mutual desire. The river arising from their confluence below the mill is called The River, and it flows on calm and contented."
Author: Olga Tokarczuk

26. "People from the mainland, particularly those from the capital, have always wanted to get married on Finø. Perhaps it has to do with the inherent difficulty of standing on Blågårds or in Virum and vowing to remain together forever when all you can see around you is evidence to the effect that one should be lucky indeed if all the things people promise each other last until Wednesday. But it is so much easier on Finø, surrounded by the half-timbered cottages from the eighteenth century, and the medieval Finø Monastery and hordes of faithful storks, and where the tourist brochure will tell you that Finø's primeval landscape remains untouched with its mulberry trees and polar bears, and Hans in local costume, and Dorada Rasmussen's colorful parrot."
Author: Peter Høeg

27. "An example of such emergent phenomena is the origin of life from non-living chemical compounds in the oldest, lifeless oceans of the earth. Here, aided by the radiation energy received from the sun, countless chemical materials were synthesized and accumulated in such a way that they constituted, as it were, a primeval "soup." In this primeval soup, by infinite variations of lifeless growth and decay of substances during some billions of years, the way of life was ultimately reached, with its metabolism characterized by selective assimilation and dissimilation as end stations of a sluiced and canalized flow of free chemical energy."
Author: R.W. Van Bemmelen

28. "Television's perfect. You turn a few knobs, a few of those mechanical adjustments at which the higher apes are so proficient, and lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primeval ooze. You don't have to concentrate. You don't have to react. You don't have to remember. You don't miss your brain because you don't need it. Your heart and liver and lungs continue to function normally. Apart from that, all is peace and quiet. You are in the man's nirvana. And if some poor nasty minded person comes along and says you look like a fly on a can of garbage, pay him no mind. He probably hasn't got the price of a television set."
Author: Raymond Chandler

29. "This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, a civilization superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past."
Author: Stanisław Lem

30. "And life? Life itself? Was it perhaps only an infection, a sickening of matter? Was that which one might call the original procreation of matter only a disease, a growth produced by morbid stimulation of the immaterial? The first step toward evil, toward desire and death, was taken precisely then, when there took place that first increase in the density of the spiritual, that pathologically luxuriant morbid growth, produced by the irritant of some unknown infiltration; this, in part pleasurable, in part a motion of self-defense, was the primeval stage of matter, the transition from the insubstantial to the substance. This was the Fall."
Author: Thomas Mann

31. "I speak the password primeval."
Author: Walt Whitman

32. "A vision had seized hold of me, like the demented fury of a hound that has sunk its teeth into the leg of a deer carcass and is shaking and tugging at the downed game so frantically that the hunter gives up trying to calm him. It was the vision of a large steamship scaling a hill under its own steam, working its way up a steep slope in the jungle, while above this natural landscape, which shatters the weak and the strong with equal ferocity, soars the voice of Caruso, silencing all the pain and all the voices of the primeval forest and drowning out all birdsong. To be more precise: bird cries, for in this setting, left unfinished and abandoned by God in wrath, the birds do not sing; they shriek in pain, and confused trees tangle with one another like battling Titans, from horizon to horizon, in a steaming creation still being formed. Fog-panting and exhausted they stand in this unreal misery - and I, like a stanza in a poem written in an unknown foreign tongue, am shaken to the core."
Author: Werner Herzog

33. "When you are philosophizing you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there."
Author: Wittgenstein

Primeval Quotes Pictures