"Primal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... trees is already a rich emerald, and large gold stars begin to spangle it. You shall see my little darling running over the green grass, with a continued song of exultation. She thinks this is the first Paradise, and that her father is the primal Adam, and that she possesses the earth, now that she ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... of emotions. 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 itself. Rightly esteemed and ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... man was a fighter. It was fight or fall, for the trail would brook no weaklings. Good or bad, a man must be a man in the primal sense, dominant, savage and enduring. The trail was implacable. From the start it cried for strong men; it weeded out its weaklings. I had seen these fellows on the ship feed their vanity with foolish fancies; ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... his feet and towered over me with clenched fists,—the sputtering flames casting a weird Brocken shadow on wall and ceiling of the fog-darkened room—I shrank into my chair, for he seemed not a man but one of the primal forces of nature. He shouted in the ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... the far faint ray from Sirius rising, When through space first was hurled The primal gloom of ancient voids surprising, This ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... sex, Meredith found her little more than a child; the result of her narrow upbringing by which she had been reared in ignorance of the primal facts of life and all that was common knowledge to the flapper of the day. But to his fastidious nature her unsophisticated innocence was the most captivating of any of the qualities he had met with in girls, ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... held her, as the primal man takes and holds his woman, tightly against his beating heart as though he would defy the world, lost in a sea of strange new emotions that rolled in golden billows ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... Following the inherent tendency of the enlightened intellect to seek unity in diversity, the One in the Many, he reached the conclusion to which so many thinkers in all ages and of all races have been driven, that underlying all phenomena is one primal and adequate Cause, the Essence of all Existence. This conclusion he expressed in a philosophic apothegm which was preserved by ...
— Ancient Nahuatl Poetry - Brinton's Library of Aboriginal American Literature Number VII. • Daniel G. Brinton
... thinking actor. Coming from the ignorance and darkness of the outer world, his first craving is for light—not that physical light which springs from the great orb of day as its fountain, but that moral and intellectual light which emanates from the primal Source of all things—from the Grand Architect of the Universe—the Creator of the sun and of all that it illuminates. Hence the great, the primary object of the first degree is to symbolize the birth of intellectual light in the mind; ...
— Masonic Monitor of the Degrees of Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft and Master Mason • George Thornburgh
... shared even then the ideas of the editors of the Gazetta del Popolo, and felt that to lay the foundations of constitutional liberty, they needs must raze those of Rome. This is a truth; and not only so,—it is the primal truth in the science of European liberty. This truth only now begins to be understood on the Continent. It is the main lesson which the re-action of 1849 has been overruled to teach. All former insurrections ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... the beginning, the pioneer encountered the savagery of border life, grappled with it, and reacted to it without guidance from other mentor than his own instincts. His need was still the primal threefold need family, sustenance, and safe sleep when the day's work was done. We who look back with thoughtful eyes upon the frontiersman—all links of contact with his racial past severed, at grips with destruction in the contenting of his needs—see ...
— Pioneers of the Old Southwest - A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground • Constance Lindsay Skinner
... respect of their marriages or the baptism of their children, and knowing no way of getting out of the kingdom and setting their conscience free, abandoned themselves to despair, and attacked certain priests, because they regarded them as the primal and principal cause of the vexations done to them. Once more, I blame those people; but I thought it my duty to explain to you the cause of their despair. If it be thought that my ministry is necessary to calm the ruffled spirits, I shall comply with pleasure. ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... length so accustomed to their hurtless menaces that I fell to beguiling the way with the invention of monstrosities, never suspecting that I owed each moment of life to the staring moon. Though hers was no primal radiance, it so hampered the evil things, that I walked in safety. For light is yet light, if but the last of a countless series of reflections! How swiftly would not my feet have carried me over the restless soil, had I known that, if still within ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... poet's own soul. Not what man sees, but what God sees—the 'Ideas' of Plato, seeds of creation lying burningly on the Divine Hand—it is toward these that he struggles. Not with the combination of humanity in action, but with the primal elements of humanity he has to do; and he digs where he stands,—preferring to seek them in his own soul as the nearest reflex of that absolute Mind, according to the intuitions of which he desires ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... is it? Doubtless—and other things, perhaps, which chemistry cannot detect. Nevertheless, give its parts what names you will, its whole is yet the wind of the living God to the bodies of men, his spirit to their spirits, his breath to their hearts. When I learn that there is no primal intent—only chance—in the unspeakable joy that it gives, I shall cease to believe in poetry, in music, in woman, in God. Nay, I must have already ceased to believe in God ere I could believe that the wind that bloweth where it listeth is free because God hath forgotten ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... of the poet Ossian. Its success was astonishing, and Macpherson followed it up with Temora (1763), another epic in the same strain. In both these works Macpherson succeeds in giving an air of primal grandeur to his heroes; the characters are big and shadowy; the imagery is at times magnificent; the language is a kind of ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... boots like the miners, and to crown all, a white sombrero such as the vaqueros wore. Handsome and headstrong he was; and Bill shook his head over the combination which made for trouble in that land where the primal instincts lay all on the surface; where men looked askance at the one who drew oftenest the glances of the women and who walked erect and unafraid in the midst of the lawlessness. Jack Allen was fast making enemies, and no one knew ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... were to arouse the terrible race about them to frenzies that were based, not on any reasoned thought processes, or which in any case they were of themselves incapable, but on the more grim and fanatic foundations of unreasoned, primal, outraged instinct. ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... a battle! On the one side devotion, simple-minded loyalty and a fighting heart in a body of such mechanical perfection as Mars had never seen before or since. On the other side a primal beast, just ...
— The Martian Cabal • Roman Frederick Starzl
... upon one than a masterpiece of sculpture, literature or music, and infinitely surpasses man's most worthy efforts. Why cross the ocean or spend an over-amount of time in the art galleries of our own country, when we dwell so near Art's primal source? Out here the Divine Artist, with all rare colors, has painted scenes of panoramic splendor and every day new and grander views are displayed, for He sketches no two alike. Then, what harmonious blending of light and shadow; what glowing veils ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... a crank. He knew that so far from being a mere animal, the Indian is of a subtlety more ancient than the Sphinx. In his primal brain—nearer nature than our own—the directness of a child mingles with the profoundest cunning. He believes easily in powers of light and darkness, yet is a sceptic all the while. Stirling knew this; but he could not know just when, if ever, the young charlatan ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... Our blind and dizzied vision sees too late The cool broad shadows trailing at the base. And then our wasted arms let slip the flowers, And our pained bosoms wrinkle from the fair And smooth proportions of our primal years, And so our sun goes down, and wistful death Withdraws love's last delusion from our hearts, And mates us with ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various
... but of its very contrary. That the cosmic drama should have followed this 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. ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... extension of slavery and the creation of additional slave States was a necessary step in the scheme, and became the well-defined single issue in the presidential election, though not necessarily the primal cause of the impending civil war. For the first time in the history of the republic the ambition of the South met overwhelming defeat. In legal form and by constitutional majorities Abraham Lincoln was chosen to the presidency, ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 4 • Various
... experience of the race from the dawn of creation, man as he is, and the times and seasons of the heavenly bodies, are part and parcel of one system. The first great division of time, the day-night (nychthemerum), for which we have no precise synonym in our language, with its primal alternation of waking and sleeping, of labor and rest, is a vital condition of the existence of such a creature as man. The revolution of the year, with its various incidents of summer and winter, and seed-time and harvest, is not less involved in our social, material, and moral progress. It ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett
... one, whatever was 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 are ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... crimson, which contrasted beautifully with her luxuriant dark tresses, had that voluptuous development and grace which only maturity and maternity can impart to the female form. In short, never had Mercedes, in the days of her primal bloom, presented a person so fascinating as now. She was a woman to sigh for, perchance to die for, and one whom a man would willingly wish to live for, if he might but hope she would live for him, or, peradventure, he ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... the shield or wield the sword of Mars! A broken 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
... glad view 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 upon ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... Giants begotten by flesh and spirits will be called evil spirits on earth, and on the earth will be their dwelling-place. Evil spirits proceed from their bodies, because they are created from above, and from the holy watchers is their beginning and primal origin; they will be evil spirits on earth, and evil spirits they will be named. And the spirits of heaven have their dwelling in heaven, but the spirits of the earth, which were born upon the earth, have their dwelling on the earth. And the spirits of the giants ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... all. 'Tis right That all should know what they obey, Lest erring conscience damp delight, And folly laugh our joys away. Thou Primal Love, who grantest wings And voices to the woodland birds, Grant me the power of saying things Too simple ...
— The Angel in the House • Coventry Patmore
... when the stability of the human race was, more or less, assured and permanent. Our primal ancestors existed in a state as nearly resembling chaos as well might be. They had not yet aggregated into communities, but vast hordes of families—a father, an uncertain number of mothers, and an astounding complexity of children—wandered ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... last letter makes me much happier. I put great faith in the healing power of the great winds and the sun. "Nature," as Walt Whitman says, "and her primal sanities." Mrs. S . . . , also, is a primal sanity. It is not, I believe, considered complimentary, in a common way, to approach an attractive lady and say pleasantly, "You are thousands of years old." Or, "You seem ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... conceiving the first initial impulse which started our Universe on its endless way. All matter being but an expression of energy, all energy being (in all probability) but the varying modes or forms of expression of one underlying primal energy, the difficulty has been in accounting for the origin of this primal energy—the initial "push," so to say, which sent the Universe ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... determination of the harmonic relations of the distances of the planets, which it was given him to solve more than twenty years afterwards. The hypothesis which he adopted proved utterly fallacious; but his primal intuition, that numerical and geometric relations connect the velocities, periods, and distances of the planets, was none ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... your pardon! The uncouthness Of that primal age is gone, And the skin of dazzling smoothness Screens not now a heart of stone. Love has flush'd those cruel faces; And those slacken'd arms forgo The delight of death-embraces, And yon ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... you are able to trace backward from any given end-result, such as sclerosis of an organ (cirrhosis of the liver, for example), through all the various acute lesions that may terminate in that particular end-result to the primal cause of the lesion. The illustrations are ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... under the brim next the dark streaks of her coarse hair. The face of the bride was simple and rude in contour and line, the face of a peasant from a long line of peasants, and it was complex with the simple complexity of the simplest and most primal emotions, with love and joy and wonder, the half-fearful triumph of swift inertia, attained at last in the full element of life. The others were different; they were dimpling and laughing and jesting in their unintelligible guttural. Their ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... western slope. (Afterward, he discovered that the gloves she wore that day were gray, and that her hat was for the most part white.) The charm of fabric and tint belonging to what she wore was no shame to her, not being of primal importance beyond herself; it was but the expression of her daintiness and the adjunct of it. She was tall, but if Joe could have spoken or thought of her as "slender," he would have been capable of calling her lips "red," in which case ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... with all its multiplicity, and so stands on "the horizon" between undivided and divided being. In the famous encyclopaedia of the "Brothers of Purity," written in the East about A.D. 1000, and representing Muslim thought at its best, the hierarchy takes this form: God, Intelligence, Soul, Primal Matter, Secondary Matter, World, Nature, the Elements, Material Things. (See Dieterici, 'Die Philosophic der Araber im X. Jahrhundert n. Chr.,' 2 vols., Leipzig, 1876-79.) In the hands of Ibn Gabirol, this is transformed thus: God, Will, Primal ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... of the Tehuantepec Isthmus, a primal woman, round-armed, deep-breasted, shapely as the dream on which Canova modeled Venus. Her skin was of the rich gold hue that marks the blood unmuddied by Spanish strain; to see her, poised on a rich hip by the river's brink, wringing her tresses after ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... Saba's weakling sons their frankincense, Iron from the naked Chalybs, castor rank From Pontus, from Epirus the prize-palms O' the mares of Elis. Such the eternal bond And such the laws by Nature's hand imposed On clime and clime, e'er since the primal dawn When old Deucalion on the unpeopled earth Cast stones, whence men, a flinty race, were reared. Up then! if fat the soil, let sturdy bulls Upturn it from the year's first opening months, And let the clods lie bare till baked to dust By the ripe suns of summer; ...
— The Georgics • Virgil
... form or an image. The word signified in early philosophical use the archetype or primal image which the Platonic philosophy supposed to be the model or pattern that existing objects imperfectly embody. This high sense has nearly disappeared from the word idea, and has been largely appropriated by ideal, tho something ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... were populous: men swarmed In public places—chattered, laughed and wept; And savages their shining bodies warmed At fires in primal woods. The wild beast leapt Upon its prey and slew it as it slept. Armies went forth to battle on the plain So far, far down in that unfathomed deep The living seemed as silent as the slain, Nor even the widows could be heard to weep. One might have thought their shaking was but ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... love-songs of the nightingale." "War, the father of all things," goes back to the same origin as language. The serenade is matched by the battle-cry. The fight between two cock-pheasants for the love of a hen-pheasant is war in its last analysis, in its primal manifestation. Selfish hatred is at the bottom of it. It is the hell-fire to which we owe the heat that is necessary to some of the noblest as to some of the vilest manifestations of human nature. Righteous indignation, sense of injustice, sympathy with the oppressed, ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... the substance 'wool,' and so forth. Chalk, wood and wool, show again, in spite of their differences, common properties, and in so far forth they are themselves counted as modes of a still more primal substance, matter, the attributes of which are space occupancy and impenetrability. Similarly our thoughts and feelings are affections or properties of our several souls, which are substances, but again not wholly in their ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... nor weight with overloading. To Shelley, Keats, and Wordsworth and that crowd I yield the bays for ground and lofty oding. Mine but the task to trace a country's growth, As evidenced by each inauguration From Washington's to Wilson's primal oath— In these U. ...
— Something Else Again • Franklin P. Adams
... the years are fleeting, With their burden of toil and pain, We know that the page Of that primal age Will ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... word meaning prayer and devotion, becomes in the laws of Manu the primal God, first-born of the creation, from the self-existent being, in the form of a golden egg. He became the creator of all things by the power of prayer. In the struggle for ascendancy, which took place between the priests and the ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... billiard ball that the hunger-desperate men found the habitat of the sea-beaver to be the kelp beds of the Aleutian Islands and northwestern America. But what use were priceless pelts where neither money nor merchant was, and men mad with hunger were thrown back on the primal necessities ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... Primal Cause and Self-created! when is done his purpose high, NARAYANA leads Immortals to their dwelling in ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... had ended by merely perpetuating the hollow structure of the old regime. Now, however, the Bolsheviki, in one night, had dissipated it, as one blows away smoke. Old Russia was no more; human society flowed molten in primal heat, and from the tossing sea of flame was emerging the class struggle, stark and pitiless-and the fragile, slowly-cooling crust of ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... agricultural, but in the cities the pursuit of knowledge still continues. There is, however, on Mars a much lessened intellectual activity than on the earth. It is a sphere of simplified needs and primal feelings exalted by acutely developed love of Music. Mars is the music planet. There are not on Mars newspapers, journals, magazines, books. The tireless production of these things on the earth has but one analogy ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... with unruffled philosophy, and divided her smiles between two or three faithful suppliants. Ila had a very high colour, and her primal fascination was less reserved than usual. Rose admired Helena too extravagantly for jealousy, and what Caro felt ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... offence is rank, it smells to heaven; It hath the primal eldest curse upon 't, A brother's murder. Pray can I not, Though inclination be as sharp as will: My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent; And, like a man to double business bound, I stand in pause where I shall first begin, And both neglect. What if this cursed ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... "A world primal again,—vistas of glory incessant and branching, A new race dominating previous ones and grander far, New politics—new literature and ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... loved and guarded the earth, although its children had departed from their early obedience. In evidence of His care, He sent, from time to time, gifted spirits among men to aid them in developing and elevating the souls so fallen from their primal innocence. These spirits He clad in sensuous bodies, that they might be prepared to enter the far country of Human Life. Earth was rapidly falling under the merciless rule of a hopeless and crushing materialism, when He determined upon sending among men, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... all 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 ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... was made with labor: Strong fusing air and fire Strove before the years of birth, With awful deed and dire, And wrought from primal chaos Amidst the ancient night. The seas and shores which are the earth, And ...
— Selected Poems • William Francis Barnard
... primal fount of life and peace, Who shedd'st Thy breathing quiet all around, In me command that pain and conflict cease, And turn ...
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs • Mary W. Tileston
... Poesy with fiery call Into my carcass, by the way methought Whence bread goes forth-there was none else at all. ' 'Now to return unto my primal thought: Who wills to know what weal awaits him, must First learn the ill that God for ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... the other or on both, proved not lovable. There has been a failure in the fundamental art of love. If we are to counterbalance facility of divorce our only sound course is to increase the stability of marriage, and that is only possible by cultivating the art of love, the primal foundation of marriage. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... philosophizing and the primal will to philosophize are both of them penetrated through and through, with this ultimate duality of love and malice. Love and malice in alternate impulse are found latent and potent in every philosophic effort. Behind ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... one voice! 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 zone; Britons, hold ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... inspired. "We can't. It's born in 'em; it's a primal instinct, like the love of a mother for her young, and it can't be eradicated! Them chickens is constructed by a divine providence for the express purpose of chasin' grasshoppers, jest as the beaver is made ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... evidently untiring. It was in its own element; obstacles meant nothing to it. It oozed over the jagged ridges that took the humans precious moments to scramble past, and the speed of its weird progress seemed to increase as theirs faltered. It was a heartless mass driven inexorably by primal instinct towards the food that lay ahead. The dim phosphorescent illumination tinged its flabby tissues a ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... Of our primal meeting, And the fateful greeting Of the How and Why! Ah, the Thingness flying From the Hereness, sighing For a love undying That ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... produce of his sudden gains. If, in the darkness, wife was separated from husband, or parent from child, vain was the hope of reunion. Each hurried blindly and confusedly on. Nothing in all the various and complicated machinery of social life was left save the primal law of self-preservation! ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... book that ever man Looked into since the world began Is Woman! As I turn those pages, As fresh as in the primal ages, As day by day I scan, perplext, The ever subtly changing text, I feel that I am slowly growing To think no other work worth knowing. And in my copy—there is none So perfect as the one I own— I find no thing set down but such As teaches ...
— The Sisters' Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... be very sure that the passage is corrupt before we set about amending it. First and last, we must remember that primal elder law, that of two readings the more difficult is to be preferred. Durior lectio preferenda 'st should be a frontlet between our brows. The weaker reading or the plainer meaning is more likely to be a printer's interpretation of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... I to live for if the great primal instinct which strives to make whole the half life of lonely manhood is defeated, suppressed, crushed out of existence? Why not as well die in the attempt to break up a wretched servitude to a perverted ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... is the EARTH-BORN, both in language and myths.—Illustrations from the legends of the Caribs, Apalachians, Iroquois, Quichuas, Aztecs, and others.—The under-world.—Man the product of one of the primal creative powers, the Spirit, or the Water, in the myths of the Athapascas, Eskimos, Moxos, and others—Never literally derived from ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... appeared on the surface it had not been easy to establish and every day brought its frictions and obstacles. The French temperament is perhaps the most difficult in the world to deal with, even by the French themselves. Our boasted individuality is merely in the primal stage compared with the finished production in France. Even the children are far more complex and intractable than ours. They have definite opinions on the subject of life, character, and the disposition of themselves ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... 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 very slowly. You have got to go the speed for which it was built. ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... for the Presidency, the slaves on our far-off plantation, miles from any railroad or large city or daily newspaper, knew what the issues involved were. When war was begun between the North and the South, every slave on our plantation felt and knew that, though other issues were discussed, the primal one was that of slavery. Even the most ignorant members of my race on the remote plantations felt in their hearts, with a certainty that admitted of no doubt, that the freedom of the slaves would be the one great ...
— Up From Slavery: An Autobiography • Booker T. Washington
... primal curse because it brings forth thistles? So thinks the farmer, no doubt, but not the goldfinches which daintily feed among the fluffy seeds, nor the bees, nor the "painted lady," which may be seen in all parts of the world where thistles grow, hovering about the beautiful rose-purple flowers. In the ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... goes to his own matriarchal stock, and at his death his bones are deposited in the cromlech of his mother's kin. In Jowai he neither lives nor eats in his wife's house, but visits it only after dark (p. 76). In the veneration of ancestors, which is the foundation of the tribal piety, the primal ancestress (Ka Iawbei) and her brother are the only persons regarded. The flat memorial stones set up to perpetuate the memory of the dead are called after the woman who represents the clan (maw kynthei p. 150), and the standing stones ranged behind them are dedicated to the male kinsmen ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... drenching a land of austerut simplicity, decomposes the mind into corresponding states of primal contentment and resilience. There arises before our phantasy a new perspective of human affairs; a suggestion of well-being wherein the futile complexities and disharmonies of our age shall have no place. To discard these wrappings, ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... serve up the gospel scheme in a compact form. It states the plan and work well, and usually correctly. It refuses to concede primal immortality to Adam, and adopts the pre-millennial view. It is ...
— That Gospel Sermon on the Blessed Hope • Dwight Lyman Moody
... 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
... intelligence, of individual character, absolutely open and broad minded; 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 ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... friend and supporter infinite satisfaction. Bill even felt he had miscalculated the primal instincts which governed this man. He knew he was exercising a powerful restraint. And it pleased as ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... hand to furnish it with the necessary material, thus increasing its power and devastation; this is one explanation. Another theory, which is probably the correct one, could safely be advanced upon plausible grounds. Supposing electricity to be the primal cause of the cloud itself, in passing across deep and irregular valleys with rugged surface, more electricity would be developed, and greater power would be infused into the revolving cone as it moved forward. When passing over a smooth, level plateau, it would excite less of the electrical ...
— A Full Description of the Great Tornado in Chester County, Pa. • Richard Darlington
... 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 need of every man. ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... thing, gods are conceived to be first things in the way of being and power. They overarch and envelop, and from them there is no escape. What relates to them is the first and last word in the way of truth. Whatever then were most primal and enveloping and deeply true might at this rate be treated as godlike, and a man's religion might thus be identified with his attitude, whatever it might be, toward what he felt to ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... are those that, after seven months' watching of the revolt, appeared, by any plausible construction of events, to have been the primal movers in this hideous convulsion? Individual opinions on this question, and such as could plead a weight of authority in regard to experience, to local advantages for conjecture, and to official opportunities for overlooking ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... good Reader, the poker which he would thrust down his windpipe to broaden it a little. With asthmatic fits and tuberous infiltrations, one is permitted to commune with any of Allah's ministers of grace or spirits of Juhannam. And that divine spark of primal, paradisical love, which is rapidly devouring all others—let us not forget that. Ay, we mean his cousin Najma. Of course, he speaks, too, of his nation, his people, awaking, lisping, beginning to speak, waiting for ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... annual deficit, and the finances were utterly disordered. Successive ministers had exhausted all ordinary resources and the most ingenious forms of taxation. They made promises, and resorted to every kind of expediency, which had only a temporary effect. The primal evils remained. The national treasury was empty. Calonne and Necker pursued each a different policy, and with the same results. The extravagance of the one and the economy of the other were alike fatal. Nobody would make sacrifices in a great national exigency. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... according to all evidence by me attainable, entirely true, tradition has been all but lost, among the ruins of fair old Florence, by the industry of modern mason-critics—who, without exception, labouring under the primal (and necessarily unconscious) disadvantage of not knowing good work from bad, and never, therefore, knowing a man by his hand or his thoughts, would be in any case sorrowfully at the mercy of mistakes in a document; but are tenfold more deceived by their own vanity, and delight in overthrowing ...
— Mornings in Florence • John Ruskin
... had not chanced to read the pages where her press-matter had celebrated her. He defended himself from the jealousy of Miss Clampett very lamely; for the luscious beauty of his Anita, her graphic art, and her sway over the audience rekindled his primal emotions to a ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... good and evil Return we. Eve dishevel Your hair for the bliss-drenched revel On our primal loam. ...
— Look! We Have Come Through! • D. H. Lawrence
... world-wide accessibility of an island environment; yet underlying Japan's present receptivity of new ideas and her outwardly indiscriminate adoption of western civilization is to be detected the deep primal stamp of the Japanese character, and an instinctive determination to preserve the core ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... my art was to me, the great primal note by which I had revealed, first myself to myself, and then myself to the world, the great passion of my life, the love to which all other loves were as marsh water to red wine, or the glow worm of the marsh to the magic mirror ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... a quality that appeals to the unversed admirer almost as strongly as the handsome flowers, which occur in large, loose panicles at the terminals of the branches. Boldly exposed, the white flowers as they lose primal freshness change to cream, but last for several weeks. The omitted compliment from formal records is the singular fragrance of the flowers—strong, sweet, and enticing, though with a drug-like savour, as if rather an artificial ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... already seen that the primal gods of this people are identical with the gods of the Greek mythology, and were originally kings of Atlantis. But it seems that these ancient divinities are grouped together as "the Aditya;" and in this name "Ad-itya" ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... 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
... or Universal Life, whence all forms proceed: Literally, "the Way," in the sense of the First Cause. Lao-tseu uses the term in other ways; but that primal and most important philosophical sense which he gave to it is well explained in the celebrated Chapter XXV. of the Tao-te-king.... The difference between the great Chinese thinker's conception of the First Cause—the Unknowable,—and the theories ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... wars, Tumults of primal love and hate, Through crags of song reverberate. Held by the Singer of High State, Battalions of the ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... Inconceivable ruminates, The unthinkable "To be or not to be?" Then, as Existence flickers into sight, A marsh-flame in the night of Nothingness— The great, soft, restful, dreamless, fathomless night— We know the Affirmative the primal curse, And loathe, with all its imbecile strain and stress, This ostentatious, ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... constitution, decreased. Every avenue, in fact, was blocked by corruption. juries, courts, legislatures, congresses, they were as if they were not. The people were walled in by impassable barriers. Nothing was left them but the primal, brute instincts of the animal man, and upon these they fell back, and the Brotherhood of Destruction arose. But no words can tell the sufferings that have been endured by the good men, here and there, who, during the past century, tried to save mankind. Some were simply ostracised from ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... (unvisited by many), rising 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 early ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... held in his hand was worth more than many years' purchase of an archiepiscopal see; that it would build cathedrals more stately than Ely or Cologne; that he who possessed it was set free for ever from the primal curse, and might follow his own inclinations without concern or hurry, without let or hindrance. And as he suddenly turned it, the rays leaped forth again with renewed brilliancy, and seemed to pierce his ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 mean ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville
... spite of his passion of anxiety during her illness, in spite of the pity and affection of his daily attitude, Kitty occupied, in truth, much less of his mind than she had ever yet occupied?—that a certain magic—primal, incommunicable—had ceased to clothe her image in ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the faithfulness of the seasons than of human tragedy or strenuous overthrow. Even so early she felt great delight in natural things; and when her heart turned to Jethro Moore, she had no doubt whatever of the straightness of its path. She trusted all the primal instincts without knowing she trusted them. She was thirsty; here was water, and she drank. Jethro was a little older than she, the son of a minister in a neighboring town. His father had marked out his plan of ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... the moon, with a silent majesty that shamed human speech, slid her bright silver plate up behind the fret of trees on the far hills. Across the river a shimmering path of light grew, broadening; and the world beamed in holy beauty, as on the primal night. ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... flickering light by the side of this full flame of personal affection. It has gone out to Mark Twain not only for what he has written, for the clean, irresistible extravagance of his humour and his unfailing command of the primal feelings, for his tenderness, his jollity and his power to read the heart of boy and man and woman; not only for the tragedies and afflictions of his life so unconquerably borne; not only for his brave and fiery dashes against tyranny, humbug, and corruption at home and ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... be done in it. I am quite satisfied he saw chances for improvement on every hand. God had placed there the material for the first gardener to work with, but He had wisely left it for the other to do with it what he thought best, when actuated by the primal instinct which makes gardeners of so many, if not the most, of us when the opportunity to ...
— Amateur Gardencraft - A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover • Eben E. Rexford
... a given inundation in the ancient or the mediaeval period.] I say the sources of the rivers, because the floods of great rivers are occasioned by heavy rains and snows which fall in the more elevated regions around the primal springs, and not by precipitation in the main valleys or on the plains ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... pretended to be in advance of himself. Institutions that his wholesome nature and habit fully accepted he had to sneer at as old-fashioned, out of a servile and snobbish fear of the future. Out of the primal forests, through all the real progress of history, man had picked his way obeying his human instinct, or (in the excellent phrase) following his nose. But now he was trying, by violent athletic exertions, to get in front ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... notwithstanding the fact that the nerve-cell is not differentiated in these primal forms, nerve-elements are, nevertheless, present in them, and serve ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... sad fate Even to tears my grief and pity moves. But tell me, in the time of your sweet sighs, By what and how Love granted that ye knew Your yet uncertain wishes.' She replied: 'No greater grief than to remember days Of joy, when misery is at hand. 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. Oft times by that reading Our eyes were drawn together, and the hue Fled from our alter'd ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... a small settlement of labourers, belonging to a tribe of aborigines called Dangurs. These originally, I believe, came from Chota Nagpoor, which seems to have been their primal home. They are a cheerful industrious race, have a distinct language of their own, and only intermarry with each other. Long ago, when there were no post carriages to the hills, and but few roads, the Dangurs were largely employed as dale runners, or postmen. Some few of them settled with ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... still there. And, in time, his reason brought forth material to fortify this impulse, too: it came out in brief, grim sentences which burned themselves into his mind. Surface was his father. To deny the primal blood-tie was not honorable. The sins of the fathers descended to the children. To suppress ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... himself had harnessed To the yoke of Fate unbending, With a blast of strange new feeling Sweeping o'er his heart and spirit, Aweless, godless and unholy, He his thoughts and purpose altered To full measure of all daring, (Still base counsel's fatal frenzy, Wretched primal source of evils, Gives to mortal hearts strange boldness,) And at last his heart be hardened His own child to slay as victim, Help in war that they were waging To avenge a woman's frailty, Victim for the good ship's ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton
... degree of purity, of their connexion one with the other and of the most widely-spread roots common to the majority of the Bantu languages. The present writer, relying on linguistic evidence, fixed the approximate date at which the Bantu negroes left their primal home in the very heart of Africa at not much more than 2000 years ago; and the reason adduced was worth some consideration. It lay in the root common to a large proportion of the Bantu languages expressing the domestic fowl—kuku (nkuku, ngoko, nsusu, nguku, nku). ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... advance of modern life and its complicated tangle of interests and creature comforts. A highly developed civilisation, with its attendant specialisation of culture, tends ever to lose sight of those elemental forces, those primal emotions, naked to wind and sky, which are the stuff from which great drama is wrought by the artist, but which, as it would seem, are rapidly departing from us. It is only in the far places, where solitary communion may be had with the elements, that this dynamic life is still ...
— Riders to the Sea • J. M. Synge
... 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 marked and striking in others of similar ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... This was the way she should see the man who was to win her, not in stuffy rooms, not dressed in stiff, ungainly clothes, not saying unmeaning things to fill the time. This tale of laborious days bounded by the fires of sunrise and sunset, this struggle with the primal forces of storm and flood, this passage across a panorama unrolling in ever wilder majesty, was the setting for her love idyl. The joy of her mounting spirit broke out in an answering cry that flew across the river to David like the call ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... All through the western part of our country have been found clay relics of various early tribes of Indians; and in some places are giant mounds in which have been buried all sorts of crude clay jugs and bowls. Since these primal peoples used for materials the natural clays and earths they succeeded in producing some ...
— The Story of Porcelain • Sara Ware Bassett
... life but every own mother or substitute-mother should have a decent place to live in so that all needed drill may be conducted in dignified privacy and in an atmosphere required for right results. The housing problem reaches back to the primal need to have a suitable living-place into which to put ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... author's nature; and the other a happy effort of imaginative humor,—one of those strokes of genius that recreate the world and clothe it with the unfading hues of romance; the theme was an old-world echo, transformed by genius into a primal story that will endure as long as the Hudson flows through its mountains to the sea. A great artist can paint a great picture on a ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... iron. On their hardy shrubs the pale pink clusters of mountain laurel were beaten into shapeless colour-masses by the wind-blown rains. Sometimes, up above, where the fiery points of redbud trees shot skyward, a thrush sang or a blue jay scolded—and the bird-notes were laden, like the air, with the primal ripeness of spring. ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... the destructive forces of nature which threatens with so much terror as fire. The senses disband in panic before it, reason flees, the voice appeals in its distress with a note that vibrates horror. In the threat of death by fire, man descends to his primal levels; his tongue speaks again the universal language, its note lending its horrified thrill to the lowest thing that moves by the divine ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... see a law, let the power of our lens be ever so immense. The true causes remain just as impalpable, as unfathomable as ever, eluding equally our microscope and our induction—ever tending towards some great primal law, as Mr. Grove has well shown lately in his most valuable pamphlet—some great primal law, I say, manifesting itself, according to circumstances, in countless diverse and unexpected forms—till all that the philosopher as well as the divine can say, is—the ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... Bomarsund; and the prize-belt is now borne, among the bruisers of the main, by the mob of iron-clads, infinitely diverse of aspect and some of them shapeless, like the geologic monsters that weltered in the primal deep. Which of these is to triumph ultimately and devour its misshapen kindred, or whether they are not all to go down before the torpedo, that carries no gun and fires no shot, is a "survival-of-the-fittest" question to be solved by Darwins ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... water was the primal element from which all had been derived; Anaximenes guessed air; Heraclitus fire; Pythagoras held that number was the essence of all things; Empedocles thought that fire and heat, accompanied by "indestructible forces," formed the basis; Xenophanes had guessed ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... mountains may be a trifle lower than in the morning of creation. The theory of gradual development was unknown to our fathers; the idea of evolution did not occur to them. Our fathers looked upon the then arrangement of things as the primal arrangement. The earth appeared to them fresh from the hands of a deity. They knew nothing of the slow evolutions of countless years, but supposed that the almost infinite variety of vegetable and animal forms had ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... ordinary expressions, arranged in certain sequences and mutual relations, which none but the initiate would observe. That few living Brahmans possess this key but proves that, as in other archaic religious and philosophical systems, the soul of Hinduism has fled (to its primal imparters—the initiates), and only the decrepit body remains with a spiritually ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... men come in clusters." That is true, but it is equally true that once in a great while, we are vouchsafed a royal guest, a man who mingles freely with the ordinary throng, yet stands far above them; a man who can wrest the primal secrets from nature's closed hand, who makes astounding discoveries, only to gladly disclose ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... wheat known to hungry man. And on these clear and opaline mornings when I see the prairie-floor waving with its harvest to be, and hear the clack and stutter of the tractor breaking sod on the outer quarter and leaving behind it the serried furrows of umber, I feel there is something primal and poetic in the picture, ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... its counterpart in Beethoven and Cherubini. The production of "Lodoiska" was the point of departure from which the great French school of serious opera, which has given us "Robert le Diable," "Les Huguenots," and "Faust," got its primal value and significance. Two men of genius, Gluck and Gretry, had formed the taste of the public in being faithful to the accents of nature. The idea of reconciling this taste, founded on strict truth, with the seductive charm ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris |
