"Primal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to moderating my disposition, I sat with Captain Leezur and the little girl on the log, and ate soiled nervine lozenges, tinctured originally with such primal medicaments as catnip and thoroughwort; and whether from that source or not, yet peace did descend ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... that man originated his first ideas of the supernatural from the external phenomena of nature which were perceptible to one or more of his five senses; his first theogony was a natural one and one taken directly from nature. In ideation the primal bases of thought must have been founded, ab initio, upon sensual perceptions; hence, must have been materialistic and natural. Spencer, on the contrary, maintains that in man, "the first traceable conception of a supernatural being is the ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... In your welfare we rejoice, Sons and brothers that have sent, From isle and cape and continent, Produce of your field and flood, Mount and mine and primal wood; Works of subtle brain and hand, And splendors of the morning land, Gifts from every British ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... movement and was empty. The ax went circling swiftly through the air, its head showing like a silver crescent against the gray twilight of the trees. It did not reach its tall objective, but fell among the undergrowth, shaking up a flying litter of birds. But in the poet's memory, full of primal things, something seemed to say that he had seen the birds of some pagan augury, the ...
— The Trees of Pride • G.K. Chesterton
... he went back to his solitary vigil, which finally became so unbearable that he sought to escape his thoughts, or at least to drown them for a while, amid the lights and life and laughter of Stark's saloon. Being but a child by nature, his means of distraction were primal and elementary, and he began to gamble, as usual with hard luck, for the cards had ever been unkind to him. He did not think of winnings or losings, however—he merely craved the occupation; and it was this that induced him to sit at a game in which Runnion played, although ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... next day we hired a fly-coach—for a chaise could never have held us and my father's books—and jogged through a labyrinth of villanous lanes which no Marshal Wade had ever reformed from their primal chaos. But poor Mrs. Primmins and the canary-bird alone seemed sensible of the jolts; the former, who sat opposite to us wedged amidst a medley of packages, all marked "Care, to be kept top uppermost" (why I know not, for they were ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... that there ever was a Hirsch, or a soot-explosion of that nature. In words nobody reminded him of it, the King least of all: and by degrees matters were again tolerably glorious, and all might have gone well enough; though the primal perfect splendor, such fuliginous reminiscence being ineffaceable, never could be quite re-attained. The diamond Cross of Merit, the Chamberlain gold Key, hung bright upon the man; a man the admired of men. He had ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... literature, the sense of freshness is nothing short of inspiring. To share the same lofty outlook, to breathe the same high air with those who first sensed a whole era of creative thoughts, is the next thing to being the gods' chosen medium for those primal expressions. ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... yonder main Thy bark, that bids the world adieu for aye To seek a better strand, The western winds their ready wings expand; Which, through the dangers of that dusky way, Where all deplore the first infringed command, Will guide her safe, from primal bondage free, Reckless to stop or stay, To that true East, where she desires ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... have taught us something about the individual mind. They have their own patter, of complexes and primal instincts, of the unconscious, which is a sort of bonded warehouse from which we clandestinely withdraw our stored thoughts and impressions. They lay to this unconscious mind of ours all phenomena that cannot otherwise ...
— Sight Unseen • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... in Massachusetts, in Virginia, and in some of the other Colonies, who could and did analyze minutely the Colonists' protest against taxation without representation, and the British rebuttal thereof; but Washington's strength lay in his primal wisdom, the wisdom which is based not on conventions, even though they be laws and constitutions, but on a knowledge of the ways in which men will react toward each other in their primitive, natural relations. In this respect he was one of the ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... by an inviolable sanctity, he stood long motionless, realizing, his followers felt, the Cabalistic teaching as to the Messiah, incarnating the Godhead through the primal Adam, pure, sinless, at one with himself and elemental Nature. At last he raised his luminous eyes heavenwards, and said in ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... The differences of primal importance which I observed between the nature of this garden, and that of Eden, as I had imagined it, were, that, in this one, all the fruit was forbidden; and there were no companionable beasts: in other respects the little domain ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... known him was an education in primal manhood. To sit at his hospitable board, with him at the head of the table, was an inspiration in the genius of life and the art of living. One of his familiars started the joke that when Wake drew the second white bean "he got a peep." He took it kindly; though in my intimacy with him, extending ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... | | of a man even in zealous anger becomes a chant, a song. All | | deep things are Song. It seems somehow the very central | | essence of us, Song; as if all the rest were but wrappings | | and hulls! The primal element of us; of us, and of all | | things. The Greeks fabled of Sphere-Harmonies: it was the | | feeling they had of the inner structure of Nature; that the | | soul of all her voices and utterances was perfect music.... | | See deep enough, and you see musically; the heart of Nature ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... sin in our parents sown Brought forth ruin for the race; Good and evil having grown From that primal root alone, Nought but ...
— The Hymns of Prudentius • Aurelius Clemens Prudentius
... makes The universe resemble God. In this The higher creatures see the printed steps Of that eternal worth, which is the end Whither the line is drawn. All natures lean, In this their order, diversely, some more, Some less approaching to their primal source. Thus they to different havens are mov'd on Through the vast sea of being, and each one With instinct giv'n, that bears it in its course; This to the lunar sphere directs the fire, This prompts the hearts of mortal animals, This the brute earth together knits, and binds. ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... Disclose her wonders, and receive thy feet Into her sapphire chambers; orbed clouds Shall chariot thee from zone to zone, while earth, A dwindled, islet, floats beneath thee. Every Season and clime shall blend for thee the garland. The Abyss of time shall cast its secrets, ere The flood marred primal nature, ere this orb Stood in her station. Thou shalt know the stars, The houses of eternity, their names, Their courses, destiny—all ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... turtle, and so they bestowed upon it the name of Moc-che-ne-nock-e-nung. In the Ojibway mythology it became the home of the Great Fairies, and to this day it is said to be a sacred spot to all Indians who preserve the memory of the primal times. The fairies lived in a subterranean abode under the island, and an old sagamore, Chees-a-kee, is related to have been conducted a la AEneus, in Virgil, to the halls of the spirits and to have seen them all assembled in the ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 1, October, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... life began, The little aims, the little span, With what passion and what pride, And what hunger fierce and wide, Thou dost break beyond it all, Seeking for the spirit unconfined In the clear abyss of mind A shelter and a peace majestical. For what is life to thee, Turning toward the primal light, With that stern and silent face, If thou canst not be Something radiant and august as night, ...
— Alcyone • Archibald Lampman
... opinion uncomplimentary to the colored man's interest in the professional and business ventures of his race-variety can be of weight, there are several antecedent facts of primal value to be considered. If devotion to either class is lacking, it must be remembered, that shortcoming is traceable to causes which, however marked may be their effects in the Negro's case, are equally ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... and show how the Creator of the earth has got him in a rat trap—put him here "willy nilly" (you know the Omar verse); and then I want to show what he does about it. There is always the eternal question from the Primal Source—"What are you going to do ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... Self-preservation is the primal law—after you've dropped the ideals—and I thought I had invented a way to hold you down. I might have saved myself the trouble—and the lie. It comes down to this, Evan: you are one man against a crooked world, and you haven't had a ghost of a ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... The grandeur of this scene! Oh! matchless Claude! Around the painter's mastery thou hast thrown An halo of surpassing loveliness! Gazing on thy proud works, we mourn the curse Which 'reft our race of Eden, for from thee, As from a seraph's wing, we catch the hues That sunn'd our primal heritage ere sin Weav'd her dark oracles. With thee, sweet Claude! Thee! and blind Maeonides would I dwell By streams that gush out richness; there should be Tones that entrance, and forms more exquisite Than throng the sculptor's visions! I would dream Of gorgeous palaces, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 338, Saturday, November 1, 1828. • Various
... asked myself vainly what it could mean. There was no direct accusation against any one, yet the implication was plain. A woman had been moved by one of the primal passions to ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve
... question that his abstinence will prove a great safeguard; though I cannot go as far as some of my abstaining friends, who seem to regard the use of alcohol as the root of what must, in the nature of things, be one of the strongest primal passions of human nature, and therefore liable to abuse, whether men are total abstainers or not. Anyhow, though a lad can be trained to strict moderation, abstinence in both alcohol and tobacco must after a time come of the lad's own free will; the last thing that answers ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... this moment to despair is the idea of perfection in your mistress, the idea that has been shattered. But when you understand that the primal idea itself was human, small and restricted, you will see that it is little more than a rung in the ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... Olive Keltridge. Aware of it, however, he was fully conscious that the fact caused him no regrets at all. Catie, as he still called her on occasion, should, of course, have been the one to comprehend him; but, like the cicada, he merely iterated "Catie didn't." And comprehension is the primal ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... over and done with, and where there was no need of bodily sustenance, there could be nothing which resembled the old weary toil of the body; but now I saw gladly that this was not so, and that the primal needs of the spirit outlast the visible world. Though my own life had been spent mostly among books and things of the mind, I knew well the joys of the countryside, the blossoming of the orchard-close, the high-piled granary, the brightly-painted waggon loaded with ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... missions, to destitute churches, to hospitals, to colleges, to alms-houses, to the support of the poor, who are not left to die unheeded as in the ancient world. Every form of Christianity, every sect and party, has its peculiar charities; but charities for some good object are a primal principle of the common creed. What immeasurable blessings have been bestowed upon mankind in consequence of this law of kindness and love! What a beautiful feature it is in the whole ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... co-ordinate the invisible. Faith we must have, or we faint by the roadside of the intelligible. The only altruism is that which can defy the cold brutality of things as they are, and convince us with things as they are not. Thus alone can the contemplation of art bring us back to primal infelicity, and restore in our souls the perfect vacuity of infants and cows. Thus only can we achieve the suffusion of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 11, 1914 • Various
... I'll be careful, Katy," said Linda. "That car was not bought for its beauty. Its primal object in this world was to arrive. Gee, how we shot curves, and coasted down the canyons, and gassed up on the level when some poor soul went batty from nerve strain! The truth is, Katy, that you can't drive ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... supreme summit. The holy union of man and woman is higher still, because it is a relation of the whole being of each to the other, and because it brings both into direct and closest contact with the Primal Source of Things, and on the line which points them highest. The relationship satisfies the whole needs of the selves of each and satisfies the urgency of ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... brute had he expected Chad to be, anyway?—Strether had occasion to make the enquiry but was careful to make it in private. He could himself, comparatively recent as it was—it was truly but the fact of a few days since—focus his primal crudity; but he would on the approach of an observer, as if handling an illicit possession, have slipped the reminiscence out of sight. There were echoes of it still in Mrs. Newsome's letters, and there were ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... single, its divinity an unit. The very heart and soul of Raymond and Perdita had mingled, even as two mountain brooks that join in their descent, and murmuring and sparkling flow over shining pebbles, beside starry flowers; but let one desert its primal course, or be dammed up by choaking obstruction, and the other shrinks in its altered banks. Perdita was sensible of the failing of the tide that fed her life. Unable to support the slow withering ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... vague uneasiness. Was it because he was tired by the struggle for this girl, for whom he had labored so faithfully? After three years of unflagging devotion, was he truly relieved to have her dismiss him? Or was it that here, in this primal country, stripped of all conventions, he saw her and himself in a new light? He did ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... yet grander shores the dynasty of my crowned fathers, and waking in the noble heart of Ione the grateful consciousness that she shares the lot of one who, far from the aged rottenness of this slavish civilization, restores the primal elements of greatness, and unites in one mighty soul the attributes of the prophet and the king.' From this exultant soliloquy, Arbaces was awakened to attend the trial of ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... Tumults of primal love and hate, Through crags of song reverberate. Held by the Singer of High State, Battalions ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... history can prove civilization a disease except to those who are intuitively on the side of the man instead of the microbe, of the people instead of the pyramid. Such instances, however, are of value in bringing those who listen to them to a clear self-consciousness of their own primal preference—and that is a distinct gain, even when the ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit
... these; customs may arise; certain types of relationship may involve social isolation; the justice of the statesman is blind to such things. It may be urged that according to Atkinson's illuminating analysis [Footnote: See Lang and Atkinson's Social Origins and Primal Law.] the control of love-making was the very origin of the human community. In Utopia, nevertheless, love-making is no concern of the State's beyond the province that the protection of children covers. [Footnote: It cannot be made too clear ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... here, through such lengths of hours, Such miracles performed in play, Such primal naked forms of flowers, Such letting Nature have her way While Heaven looks from ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... primal man, Grim utilitarian, Loving woods for hunt and prowl, Lake and hill for fish and fowl, As the brown bear blind and dull To ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... their flame Sheer down the primal wall, But up and up each linking troop In stretching festoons crawl— Nor fire a shot. Such men appall The foe, though brave. He, from the brink, Looks far along the breadth of slope, And sees two miles of dark dots creep, And knows they ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... harp, suspended at his side, A faded garland, wreathed about his brow, Tell what he was, and still employ his care. With thin white hand, that trembles at its task, In vain he strives to bind the broken chords, And to their primal melody attune them;— In vain,—for to his efforts still replies A boding strain of harsh, discordant sound. And then, with hot tears coursing down his cheeks, He lifts his faded wreath from his pale brow, And gazing on its withered leaves, exclaims,— "For ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... it seems now—we two white men, gentlemen of quality, completely oblivious to blood, birth, tradition, breeding—our primal allegiance, our very individualities sunk in the mystical freemasonry of a savage tie which bound us to the two nations we assumed to speak for, Oneida and Delaware—two nations of the great Confederacy of the Iroquois that ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... itself has contributed towards the existing order by creating proletarians and delivering them up to exploiters. They forget to prove us that it is possible to put an end to exploitation while the primal causes—private capital and poverty, two-thirds of which are artificially created by the State—continue ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... fail to comprehend the infinite. How much less then can words define that which even the whole phenomenal universe fails to express! The change from the One to the Many is not to be described. How the All-Deity becomes the primal Trinity, is the eternal problem set for man's solution. No system of religion or philosophy has ever explained this inexplicable mystery, for it cannot be understood by the embodied Soul, whose vision and comprehension ...
— Simon Magus • George Robert Stow Mead
... himself with patience and forbearance, is liable to become, I do not say insane, but desperate. Another reason even may be assigned, in what pertains to the religious. As a general thing, their insanity has as its primal cause melancholy; and this is very common to the regular curas who are alone, and who, experiencing the ingratitude of the Indian, his fickleness in virtue, and his indifference in matters of religion, think that their sacrifice for the natives is ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... ye knew Your yet uncertain wishes?" She replied: "No greater grief than to remember days Of joy, when mis'ry is at hand! That kens Thy learn'd instructor. Yet so eagerly If thou art bent to know the primal root, From whence our love gat being, I will do, As one, who weeps and tells his tale. One day For our delight we read of Lancelot, How him love thrall'd. Alone we were, and no Suspicion near us. Ofttimes by that reading ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... those of surrounding nature, by the use of artificial weapons, the first step in a new and illimitable range of evolution was taken. From that day to this, man has been occupied in unfolding this method, and has advanced enormously beyond his primal state. A crude and simple use of weapons gave him, in time, supremacy over all the lower animals. An advanced use of weapons and tools has given him, in a measure, supremacy over nature herself, and raised him to a stage almost infinitely beyond that of the animal ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... the till Of treasure, mountain, grim and gray, Playing with wind and wave, child-lough And lazy bay—Archaic group Are they, whose quiet naught details Of primal epochs; yet, as face Of man with furrowed wrinkles marked And seared, suggests his past life's course, Their presence in itself reveals The trace of annals which their calm Conceals. So Mystery's seeds were sown. Even the simple Indian folk,— ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... honest Wesleyan was he, Who never knew hypocrisy. George Poole in days more distant still, In the little church on "Sandy Hill," Which gave its name to "Chapel Street," His congregation oft did meet. And John C. Davidson, also, Was one of those who long ago 'Mid primal darkness, thick and gross, Unfurled the banner of the cross; A Methodist both sound and prime He was esteemed in the old time, 'Till something gave his faith a lurch, And he bolted to the English Church, In which 'tis said that he is quite "A ...
— Recollections of Bytown and Its Old Inhabitants • William Pittman Lett
... reproduction of the plant. This work can all be done before the child is eight years old, and in many cases it can be done much earlier, at least so far as inculcating the most essential truths is concerned. Many details will slip away in time, but if the work is thoroughly done the great primal truths of living things will stay, and as the child's life unfolds, they will ...
— The Renewal of Life; How and When to Tell the Story to the Young • Margaret Warner Morley
... fantastic creatures of the erring mind of man." "But there must be a God," said another. "All nature cries aloud there is a God. Our own hearts' instincts—our highest intuitions,—assure us there is. As well deny the universe, and the primal intuitions of humanity, as the being of God. A God and a future life are necessities of human nature. And there is, without us, a supply for every want within us. As soon will you find a race of beings with ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... within,' which may be called complementary worlds. But nature is ever liberal, and her chords are generally harmonies, or exquisite modifications of concord. The chord of the tonic, in music, is the primal type of this harmony in sound; it is perfectly satisfactory to the tympanum; and the ear, knowing no further elements (for the tonic chord combines them all), ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... heart, O Christ; thou know'st I love thee. But wretched is the thing I call my love. O Love divine, rise up in me and move me— I follow surely when thou first dost move. To love the perfect love, is primal, mere Necessity; and he who holds life dear, Must love thee every hope and ...
— A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul • George MacDonald
... magnet. The world becomes another world in these mystic hours; it has new rulers and new laws—or rather, it has none. The moon sways more than ocean tides. In broad day Deb would no more have stalked a man than she would a crocodile; in this soft, free, empty, irresponsible night the primal woman was out of her husk, one with the desert-prowling animal that calls through the moonlit silence for its mate. Twenty times had she snubbed an ardent lover at the behest of all sorts of reasons and so-called instincts cultivated for her guidance by generations ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... of the gradual levelling of the mountains, in the huge blocks of rock piled up in the most grotesque shapes. Many of these are colossal pillars, surmounted by boulders weighing many tons. The softer rock and gravel have washed down the ravines, leaving these as monuments of the primal ages. The ravines penetrate the mountain on every side, and little by little wear the monster away. The beavers choose the prettiest nooks in them for their villages, and the miner, finding the water cut off, often learns that in a single night these busy architects have built ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... funny little Scotch accent that manifested itself in certain phrasings, certain vowel sounds at variance with good English pronunciation. He wanted to know just how much Pocatello had done to spoil her. Beneath all was the primal instinct of the young male dimly seeking the female whom his destiny had ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... mist of the moon, And ray of the sun all mingled in her. And the heart of her asked but a single boon - That love should seek her, and find her, and win her. She grasped the scope of the First Intent That made her kingdom FOR HER, no other, And joyfully into her place she went - The primal mate, and the ...
— Poems of Experience • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... the supreme divinity, and he first speaks: "How sorely mortals blame the Gods!" It is indeed an alienated discordant time like the primal fall in Eden. But why this blame? "For they say that evils come from us, the Gods; whereas they, through their own follies, have sorrows beyond what is ordained." The first words of the highest God concern the highest problem of the poem and of ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... would be divided by the officers of the church.* Tullidge, explaining this view in his history published in 1886, says that this was simply following out the social plan of a Zion which Smith attempted in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois, under "revelation." He explains: "According to the primal law of colonization, recognized in all ages, it was THEIR LAND if they could hold and possess it. They could have done this so far as the Mexican government was concerned, which government probably never would even ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... different names, for there is no man in this smug, complacent age of ours, but carries within him a power of evil greater or less, according to his intellect. Scratch off the social veneer, lift but a corner of the very decent cloak of our civilization, and behold! there stands the Primal Man in all his old, wild savagery, and with the devil leering upon his shoulder. Indeed, to-day as surely as in the dim past, we are all possessed of a devil great or small, weaker or stronger as the case may be; a demon which, though he sometimes seems to ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... picturesquely before us, and yet forbidden. We thought of Tantalus, and his fate, of Prometheus and the rock—of—of Adam and his expulsion, and must own that in our first feelings of disappointment, we made but a partial excuse for our primal progenitor, and great great grandmother, as we repeated those expressive lines of the poet, so ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... which spans the stream; the storm so long threatened begins now to let loose its rage against all unsheltered mortals. Here De Quincey consents to bid you good-bye,—to you his last good-bye; and as here you leave him, so is he forever enshrined in your thoughts, together with the primal mysteries of night and of storm, of human tragedies and of the most pathetic ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... of everything else. In the scriptural account of creation preceded by intention on the part of the Creator it is said that each of these elements was made tripartite; and this tripartite constitution of all things is apprehended by Perception as well. The red colour in burning fire comes from (primal elementary) fire, the white colour from water, the black colour from earth—in this way Scripture explains the threefold nature of burning fire. In the same way all things are composed of elements ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... subject of much regret that although its mouth was discovered by the Chevalier La Salle nearly two hundred years ago, there was still much uncertainty as to its true source. Within the last century several distinguished explorers have attempted to find the primal reservoir of the Great River. Beltrami, Nicollett, and Schoolcraft have each in turn claimed the goal of their explorations. Numerous lakes, ponds, and rivers have from time to time enjoyed the honor of standing ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... of many primal influences forgotten or denied by races of higher type and deeper culture. Very little is known concerning the Malayan people who mingled with almost every Oriental stock. Amphibious tastes suggest picturesque traditions of prolonged voyaging in search of fresh fishing grounds to supply the ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... the cold and silent Past! A relic to the present cast, Left on the ever-changing strand Of shifting and unstable sand, Which wastes beneath the steady chime And beating of the waves of Time! Who from its bed of primal rock First wrenched thy dark, unshapely block? Whose hand, of curious skill untaught, Thy rude ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... go there." He turned irresolutely, and they walked together down the plank pathway, Kitty with an oppressive sense of having fallen into the clutch of one of the Primal Forces, who was about to settle her destiny for her; in which she stumbled almost on the truth. Miss Muller was quite aware of the fact of her brother's visits at the book-shop, and their motive. She glanced at her watch: she could give herself half an hour to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... awoke to find its heart unchanged and war with aggressive animalism still the underlying and primal force ...
— Why I Preach the Second Coming • Isaac Massey Haldeman
... not puzzle him with scientific theories. All that the great comedian required of him was to observe and to imitate. Observation, imitation, lo! the groundwork of all art! the primal elements of all genius! Not there, indeed to halt, but there ever to commence. What remains to carry on the intellect to mastery? Two steps,—to reflect, to reproduce. Observation, imitation, reflection, reproduction. In these stands a mind complete and consummate, fit ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... these, which, if really intended by the architect, would imply an utterly fatuous habit of concealing elaborately what he desired to symbolise, the pyramidalists base their belief that 'a Mighty Intelligence did both think out the plans for it, and compel unwilling and ignorant idolators, in a primal age of the world, to work mightily both for the future glory of the one true God of Revelation, and to establish lasting prophetic testimony touching a further development, still to take place, of the ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... where even wheels can run; and many travel it;—till—till the Town of Stowe disappear from that locality (as towns have been known to do), or no merchandising, heavenly oracle, or real business any longer exist for one there: then why should anybody travel the way?—Habit is our primal, fundamental law; Habit and Imitation, there is nothing more perennial in us than these two. They are the source of all Working and all Apprenticeship, of all Practice and all Learning, in ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... slanting round suddenly suffused the whole. "Pretty boy!" thought Mrs. Laudersdale; "beautiful picture!" and she flitted on. But Roger Raleigh was not a boy, although sleep, that gives back to all stray glimpses of their primal nature, endowed him peculiarly with a look of childlike innocence ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... is excluded from certain occupations, and contact with her has to be carefully regulated. I agree with Mr. Andrew Lang that in the regulations concerning women amongst uncivilised people we have another illustration of the far-reaching principle of taboo (Social Origins and Primal Law, p. 239) she suffers because of her sex, and because of the superstitious dread to which her sex nature ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... menacing, abrupt, imperative. The high lamps cast strange shadows on their lost faces. The voices grew hoarse, dropped to low growls, their faces changed from ferocity to a mournful solemnity until they looked even more like primal men than before; but they continued their marching and stamping until Gora, who, with the other women, had begun to fear that the rhythm would bring down the house, had the inspiration to insert a Caruso disk into the victrola; ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... called, Must be called back to the primal Centre. Let no soul tremble or be appalled, For the heart of the Maker is where we enter - Is where we enter to gain new force Before we ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... "nothing but," however, he obviously falls into the primal and perennial error of philosophical speculators—dogmatising from negative arguments. He may be right or wrong; but the most he, or anybody else, can prove in favour of his conclusion is, that we know nothing more of the ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... and shallow as a doll's, and edged with long, fine lashes. Intelligence, of a certain degree, was rapidly informing them. Kirkwood returned their questioning glance, transfixed in indecision, his primal impulse to cut-and-run for it was gone; he had nothing to fear from this child who could not prevent his going whenever he chose to go; while by remaining he might perchance worm from him ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... maples around a mirrorlike wood pool, of a wakening in the world and a stir of hidden pulses under the gray sod. The spring was abroad in the land and Marilla's sober, middle-aged step was lighter and swifter because of its deep, primal gladness. ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... is true; but it proclaims the strength of the novelist rather than his weakness. Indeed, it is in the very exaggeration of Dickens that his astonishing creative power is most clearly manifest. There is something primal, stupendous, in his grotesque characters which reminds us of the uncouth monsters that nature created in her sportive moods. Some readers, meeting with Bunsby, are reminded of a walrus; and who ever saw a walrus without thinking of the creature ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... history of man proves this fact, that the noblest instances of self-sacrificing patriotism which have adorned the drama of human life, have been presented by those who are devoted to agricultural pursuits. It is the only pursuit that man followed in his state of primal innocence, and surviving his fall, allows ...
— Sketches of Western North Carolina, Historical and Biographical • C. L. Hunter
... to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And to this truth, as he saw it, Lincoln referred in those memorable words I have already cited bearing on our national crime in long forgetfulness of our own immutable principles. The fundamental, primal principle was indeed more clearly voiced by Lincoln than it has been voiced before, or since, in declaring again, and elsewhere that to our nation, dedicated "to the proposition that all men are created equal," has by Providence been assigned the momentous task of "testing whether ...
— "Imperialism" and "The Tracks of Our Forefathers" • Charles Francis Adams
... on Earth, or has even the slightest inkling that interplanetary travel has been achieved. Whatever we do, it will have to be on our own. But to break in on a creature engaged in—well, we don't know what primal private activity—is against all ...
— What's He Doing in There? • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... do, do it in My name," is subjected to some very unorthodox interpretations by many members of the colored race. Indeed, by their peculiar interpretation of this command, it is established that "two clean sheets can't smut", which means that a devout man and woman may indulge in the primal ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume IV, Georgia Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... primal happiness; The stark ice ribs my high and hollow cave. The vortex of the World spins raptureless, And languorously crawls the oily wave. From sun-shot peaks of dawn no more I leap Like a launching condor past control,— O speak, Son of the West! if this be Sleep— Or Death that is our ...
— The Masque of the Elements • Herman Scheffauer
... and swift, and the upward rise short and slow. How long it took us to make the two miles to our friend's dock we shall never know. Probably only a few minutes. But it was not an experience in time. We had a sense of being at one with the great primal forces of wind and water, and at one with them, not in their moments of poise, but in their ...
— More Jonathan Papers • Elisabeth Woodbridge
... of mosaic, this Communist system: a place for every man, and every man in his place; "to insure to each human being the freest development of his faculties": there is a grand fragment of absolute truth in that, a going back to primal Nature, to a like life with that of sunshine and pines, a Utopia more Christ-like than the heaven (which Christ never taught) of eternal harp-playing and golden streets. But as for making it real, every man's life should have the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... intense and enthusiastic admirers,—the proportion of those who yield to his genius a cold and reluctant homage is probably greater in Scotland than in any other country in Christendom. "The rest of mankind recognize the essential truth of his delineations, and his loyalty to all the primal instincts and sympathies of humanity"; but the Scotch cannot forget that he opposed the Reform Bill, painted the Covenanters with an Episcopalian pencil, and made a graceful and heroic image ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... glares-in upon him. Really his utterances, are they not a kind of 'revelation;'—what we must call such for want of some other name? It is from the heart of the world that he comes; he is portion of the primal reality of things. God has made many revelations: but this man too, has not God made him, the latest and newest of all? The 'inspiration of the Almighty giveth him understanding:' we must listen before all ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... breath propels the winged seed afloat; His tempests swerve to spare the fragile boat; Here on this rock and on this sterile soil, Began the kingdom, not of kings, but men; Began the making of the world again, Their primal code of liberty, their rules Of civil right; their churches, courts and schools; Their freedom's very secret here laid down— The spring of government is the little town! On their strong lines, we base our social health— The man—the home—the town—the ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... that we saw of the wedding at Kafr Kenna—just a vivid, mysterious flash of human figures, drawn together by the primal impulse and longing of our common nature, garbed and ordered by the social customs which make different lands and ages seem strange to each other, and moving across the narrow stage of Time into the dimness of that Arab village, where Jesus and His mother and His disciples were guests at a wedding ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... chief who led the Imperial troops, and Kume became the ancestor of the Kumebe, a hereditary corporation of palace guards. Further, they hold that whereas Ninigi and his five adjunct Kami all traced their lineage to the two producing Kami of the primal trinity, the special title of sovereignty conferred originally on the Sun goddess was transmitted by her to the Tenson (heavenly grandchild), Ninigi, the distinction of ruler and ruled being thus clearly defined. Finally they hold that Ninigi and these ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... says, succinctly and decidedly, "The primal evidence of the forgery lies in the ink writing, and in that alone";[S] but he expressly bases this dictum upon the decisions of the professed palaeographers of the British Museum and the Record Office. He goes on, however, to assign important collateral proof of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... set has its points." For Rickie suffered from the Primal Curse, which is not—as the Authorized Version suggests—the knowledge of good and evil, but the knowledge ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... a primal law, simple yet complex, which we who understand life's manifold ascensions grow to symbolize in our thought, language, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... as well as up. They may have grown into, or something like, human beings. Lady Arabella March is of snake nature. She has committed crimes to our knowledge. She retains something of the vast strength of her primal being—can see in the dark—has the eyes of a snake. She used the nigger, and then dragged him through the snake's hole down to the swamp; she is intent on evil, and hates some one we love. ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... Hence, from the imperfections of reason, or from disregard of other established truths, deductions may be pushed to absurdity even when logical, and may be made to conflict with the obvious meaning of primal truths from which these deductions are made, or at least with those intuitions which are hard to be distinguished from consciousness itself. There may be no flaw in the argument, but the argument may ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... a literary epoch differ according as that epoch is primal or derivative. There are those edifices of letters which start up, not indeed out of nothing, but out of things wholly different. Produced by a shock or a revelation, as two gases lit will, in a sharp explosion, unite to form a liquid wholly unlike either, so after a great conquest, a battle, the ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... for declension it is, though we achieve all the confidences of Melampus, and even master with him the pleasant argot of the woods — may still be ours if we suffer what lives in us of our primal cousins to draw us down. On the other hand, let soul inform and irradiate body as it may, the threads are utterly shorn asunder never: nor is man, the complete, the self-contained, permitted to cut himself wholly adrift from ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... this is supremely true of the sexual part of life. If mere lust is the vilest thing on earth, pure love is the most beautiful. And when pure love dominates a life all the sexual activities of the body may be transmuted and redeemed until a complete life is attained in which all the primal forces of our beings find a happy exercise under the control of a passion that is at once physical, mental, and spiritual. But the body is not in this process denied. It is accepted, understood, and made to play its true part. If passion be truly handled it provides the driving force for ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... Spirit that is older than her child. She is a mute, unconscious sacrament between the infinite reason and the finite, a path for the lightning that plays backward and forward between the soul of man and the soul of God. The great primal fact in the human environment is that man is the interpreter of nature. In this character of interpreter of nature he receives his first message from God, and makes his ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... for fighters, guns and ships. We must further consider the generous allowance some nations make for pensions. A large and unestimated sum may also be added to the account from loss of military conscription, again not counting the losses to society through those forms of poverty which have their primal cause in war. For in the words of Bastiat, "War is an ogre that devours as much when he sleeps as when he is awake." It was Gambetta who foretold that the final end of armament rivalry must be "a beggar crouching ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... better name, Goddess of gentleness and torture-flame, Still are you despot; still are we the thrall; Still we can only wait what Fate may fall From your wild pinions that no man can tame. Nor gold or gain, nor battlement or wall Shall guard us from the primal flood and flame. ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... Into thy healing seas again.... For when we swim out, side by side, Like a lover with his bride, When thy lips are salt with brine, And thy wild eyes flash in mine, The music of a mightier sea Beats with my blood in harmony. I breast the primal flood of being, Too clear for speech, too near for seeing; And to his heart, new reconciled, The Eternal ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... dead man's grave And yet—God knows—it is the best we can; And better than the world's way, to forget." So saying, like one that murmurs happy words To torture his own grief, half in self-scorn, He breathed a scrap of balladry that raised The mists a moment from that Paradise, That primal world of innocence, where Kit In childhood played, outside his father's shop, Under the sign of the ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... down-trodden peasantry, sluggish and uneducated, do not live out half their days. Very likely the farmer's lot, plus education and plus habits of mental activity, is the healthiest as it is the primal condition of man. Nevertheless, considering what is the general opinion, it is surprising how slight is the advantage which he has even then over the purely ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... mere nature, and the humility and penitence in which alone mere nature receive it; yet I think that our movement from one to the other is more naturally described by us in the language of growth than in the language of convulsion. The primal object of religion is to disclose to us this perdurable basis of life, and foster our growth into communion with it. And whatever its special, language and personal colour be—for all our news of God comes to us through the consciousness of individual men, and ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... assume in Him a triple Personality, so that in all tongues singular and plural are alike applicable to Him. He is spirit; he is the circle which circumscribes everything and which nothing ever circumscribes; immense, eternal, immutable, He is the Primal out of which all is darkness. Unlimited by time, without laws save in His own will, in the bosom of eternity, He, who is three in One, acts;—Power executes what Wisdom proposes, and Infinite Love is forever germing into ever new loves. Like a triple arrow from a single ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... intelligent mind to render it so,—that is, to effect it continually or at stated times,—as what is supernatural does to effect it for once."[8] He merely inquires into the form of the miracle, may remind us that all recorded miracles (except the primal creation of matter) were transformations or actions in and upon natural things, and will ask how many times and how frequently may the origination of successive species be repeated before the supernatural ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... of our nobly imaginative faculty, is the worship of the Letter, instead of the Spirit, in what we chiefly accept as the ordinance and teaching of Deity; and the apprehension of a healing sacredness in the act of reading the Book whose primal commands ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... the way into the sorrowful city; into eternal dole among the lost people. Justice incited my sublime Creator. Divine Omnipotence, the highest wisdom, and the Primal Love created me. Before me, there were no created things. Only eternal, and I eternal, last. Abandon hope, all ye ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... He may as usefully declaim against friendship, comradeship, the love of man for woman or of mother for child. The lowest savage regards himself, and cannot but regard himself, as a member of some sort of political aggregation. This feeling is one of the primal instincts of humanity, and as such one of the permanent data of the problem of the future. It is folly to denounce or seek to eradicate it. The wise course is to give it large and noble instead of petty and parochial concepts to which to attach ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... towards him, and for a moment both men stood confronting each other, their fists clenched. Their primal instincts were aroused. Like wild beasts, full of savage hatred, they were hungry and ready to fly ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... Being primal in his instincts, as every great man is, Mr. Bayard, at this hostile declaration, could not avoid a quick side-glance at Richard's door-wide shoulders, Pict arms, and panther build. ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... was an incorporation, that the people had laid down a constitution, an organic law. The people were never consulted, did not exist, had not for political purposes been invented. It was the great primal defect of their institutions, but the Netherlanders would have been centuries before their age had they been able to remedy that defect. Yet the Netherlanders would have been much behind even that age of bigotry had they admitted the possibility in a free commonwealth, of that most sacred and ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... But let me ask you why you consider the tiger more bloodthirsty than yourself? He springs upon his food— you buy yours from the butcher. He cannot live without animal food: it is a primal necessity, and he obeys the ordained instinct. You can live on vegetables; yet you slaughter beasts of the field and birds of the air (or buy them when slaughtered), and consider yourself a model of virtue. The tiger only kills his food or his ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... particular course; that from the cooling down of fiery nebulas there should have come forth the orderly system we behold in nature; that life should have climbed up from the speck of protoplasm "through primal ooze and slime," making its way step by step through all the lower creation until it "blossomed into man"—this, to the unbiassed mind, does not wear the aspect of mere incalculable accident, but of all-embracing wisdom and directivity. And once we have shaken off the delusion that the marvellous ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... disorder, superficial brightness, fundamental dullness, then cowardice and suspicion—all a part of the minority (the non-people) the antithesis of everything called soul, spirit, Christianity, truth, freedom—will give way more and more to the great primal truths—that there is more good than evil, that God is on the side of the majority (the people)—that he is not enthusiastic about the minority (the non-people)—that he has made men greater than man, that he has made the universal mind ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... has deeper root here than any aristocratic institution has in Europe; and politics is but the common pulse-beat, of which revolution is the fever-spasm. Yet we have seen European aristocracy survive storms which seemed to reach down to the primal strata of European life. Shall we, then, trust to mere politics, where even revolution has failed? How shall the stream rise above its fountain? Where shall our church organizations or parties get strength to attack their great parent and moulder, ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... dry leaves fluttering to the ground, of heaped dead leaves or coarse winter grass, stirring in some slight movement of the air. It seemed to his imagination as though under the darkness, in the loneliness of night, the man-mastered world must be secretly transformed, returned to its primal freedom; and that could he go forth into it alone, he would find it quite different from anything familiar to him, and might meet with something, he knew not what, secret, strange, and ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... secret spot that is called space. White Father of all white unwearied things, white flames and white flowers and white peaks. Father, who art more innocent than all thy most innocent and quiet children; primal purity, into the ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... with Mother Nature, has its immutable laws. The people who existed before the flood were, in their primal motives, like those of today. The conventionality of highly civilized society does not change the heart, but it puts so much restraint upon it that not a few appear heartless. They march through life and fight its battles like uniformed men, trained in a certain school of tactics. ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... drawing on metal. But I do mean to tell you that both Rembrandt's etchings, and Le Keux's finished line-work, are misapplied labor, in so far as they regard chiaroscuro; and that consummate engraving never uses it as a primal element of pleasure. ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... from the Highest—into a message echoed and reiterated upon his ear by the multitudinous voices of that wild night. The rain whispered it on the roof-trees, the wind and sea thundered it; out of elemental chaos the awful command came, as from primal lips which had spoken since creation to find at last the ultimate destination of their message within a human ear. To Noy, his purpose, not yet an hour old, seemed ancient as eternity, a fixed and deliberate impression which had ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... seem to us fatal to Prof. Westermarck's theory, as well as to point strongly to the view that the sentiment has a purely conventional or customary source. Now, if we accept some such view of the constitution of primitive society as has been suggested by Messrs. Atkinson and Lang (PRIMAL LAW), namely, that the social group consisted of a single patriarch and a group of wives and daughters, over all of whom he exercised unrestricted power or rights; we shall see that the first step towards the constitution of a higher form of society must have been the strict limitation ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... economists confuse their readers and themselves by a loose use of the term wealth, including in it many things which have nothing at all to do with economics. Good health and cheerful spirits, for example, are often spoken of as wealth and there is a certain primal sense in which that word is rightly applied to them. You remember the poem by ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... impoverished Europe in the four succeeding years, begging for freedom and a place to live. These millions too were given bonuses of grants of land, and soon the uninhabited West was dotted with primitive homesteads and scattered ranches that must be served. Food, in all its varieties, is a primal necessity. Warehouses, clumsy predecessors of modern stores, must be constructed at advantageous points to shelter foods and make distribution to remote sections. ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney
... shown the necessity of an ever-present Mind as the primal cause both of all physical and biological evolution. This Mind works by and through the primal forces of nature—by means of Natural Selection in the world of life; and I do not think I could read a book which rejects this method in ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... be necessary for the reader to remember that Spinoza commenced his philosophical studies at the same point with Descartes. Both recognized existence as the primal fact, self-evident and indisputable. ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... defiant eyes. Sanchia's hands clenched and the resultant impression given forth by her whole demeanour was that upon occasion the little widow might be swept into such passionate rage that she was prone to resort to primal, physical violence. Helen, though her own cheeks burned, smiled loftily and made ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... Care-free child of a kingly race. Undemonstrative? Yes, in a measure, But every movement replete with grace. Whiles we mocked at the monkeys' tricks Or pored apart on the apteryx; These could yield but a passing pleasure; Yours was the primal place. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 19, 1919 • Various |
