"Primal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... other line for yourself, but you will find you cannot make a right tree spray of it. For all tree boughs, large or small, as well as all noble natural lines whatsoever, agree in this character; and it is a point of primal necessity that your eye should always seize and your hand trace it. Here are two more portions of good curves, with leaves put on them at the extremities instead of the flanks, Fig. 38; and two showing the arrangement of masses of foliage seen a little farther off, Fig. ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... doom which to the guilty pair Without the walls of Eden came, Transforming sinless ease to care And rugged toil, no more shall bear The burden of old crime, or mark of primal shame. ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... little aims bring care. Why run after success? That is success which follows: success should be cosmic, a new creation, not any trick or feat. To be man is the only success. For this we lie back grandly with total application to the cause. Why run after knowledge? A large mind circles all the primal facts from its own stand-point, and needs never tread the curious round of science, history, and art. Where it is, is Nature: therefore it is calm and free. The wise men of my knowledge were farmers, drovers, traders, learned beyond the book. You cannot ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... report her truly. And this is the first and leading element. Review for yourselves the history of art, and you will find this to be a manifest certainty, that no great school ever yet existed which had not for primal aim the representation of some natural fact as truly as possible. There have only yet appeared in the world three schools of perfect art—schools, that is to say, that did their work as well as it seems ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... the worship of Mammon is triumphant, and the mischief is that when the great god Pan is driven away he returns no more. When once Money-hunger seizes on a nation, that primitive and wholesome Earth-hunger—old as the primal Eden, where man's life began—is stifled at the birth; the spade and harrow rust, and instead of swords being beaten to ploughshares, ploughshares are beaten into swords for the use of soldiers who are the gladiators of commercial ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... by the 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
... His lips did not move; had he spoken, at the sound of his own voice the charm had cracked, the little lyric had shrunk away before tragedy that was yet as fierce as it was profound, that had as yet few other notes than those of primal pain. ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... of this volume is that the necessary ideas and laws of the reason, and the native instincts of the human heart, originally implanted by God, are the primal and germinal forces of history; and that these have been developed under conditions which were first ordained, and have been continually supervised by the providence of God. God is the Father of humanity, and he is also the Guide and Educator of our race. As "the offspring of God," humanity is not ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... Bigelow was not a snob, and he was a gentleman. But even a gentleman can, when swayed by primal emotions, convince himself that high motives rule, even while performing acts ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... still ascendant adolescence. He is about sixteen years of age—a boy yesterday, a man to-morrow—to-day both and neither—something beyond boyhood, but not yet limited by man's responsibility and man's absorbing passions. He partakes of both ages in the primal awakening to self-consciousness. Desire, which in Don Juan has become a fiend, hovers before him like a fairy. His are the sixteen years, not of a Northern climate, but of Spain or Italy, where manhood appears in a flash, and overtakes the child with sudden sunrise of new faculties. Nondum amabam, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... didst lead astray Those primal goddesses with draughts of wine, O'erturning ordinance. Young, thou wouldst override our ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... wanted, and with the same youthful intensity, to be very good, even though it seemed sometimes to that same youthfulness a strange and tragic thing that it should be all she wanted. The mysterious, fathomless depression of youth, as of something akin to unknown primal depths of loneliness, sometimes laid its chill hand on her heart; but when Dosia "said her prayers," she got, child-fashion, very near to a Some One who brought her an intimate tender comfort of resurrection ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... middle-aged men, and in fact many of us who have not yet reached that way mark, have entirely forgotten is that Nature is very chary of her favors. Our primal mother is just and kind, but she has little use for the man who neglects her laws. When a man earns his bread by the sweat of his brow she maintains him in good physical condition. When he rides in ...
— Keeping Fit All the Way • Walter Camp
... reaffected as the environment alters. When we consider the incalculable, inconceivable lapse of time through which organic life has been swayed by the never-ceasing action of the forces around it, we can imagine what a vast variety of animal forms may have been evolved from some one primal ancestor. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... followed without any other restraint than fear, while in man it is largely though no doubt very imperfectly limited by moral self-control. Most crimes spring not from anything wrong in the original and primal desire but from the imperfection of this higher, distinct or superadded element in our nature. The crimes of dishonesty and envy, when duly analysed, have at their basis simply a desire for the desirable—a ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... 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 ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... 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
... that woman possesses in a higher degree than man that adaptation to the conditions surrounding her which is everywhere accepted as evidence of superior vitality and higher physical rank in life; and when biology becomes more fully understood it will also be universally acknowledged that the primal creative power, like the first manifestation of life, ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... pulses hammered in his ears, yet he heard around him still the mellow murmuring of bees, and saw the butterflies whirling deliriously together. All the forces which had held him under restraint stretched suddenly, while he met her eyes, like bands that were breaking. Before the solitary primal fact of his love for her, the fog of tradition with which civilization has enveloped the simple relation of man and woman, evaporated in the sunlight. The harsh outlines of the future were veiled, and he saw only the present, crowned, radiant, and sweet to the senses as the garlands of wild ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... Norse word is rlg, which is plural, (from r Ger. ur, and lg, laws,) and means the primal law, fate, weird, doom; the Greek moira. The idea of predestination was a salient feature in the Odinic religion. The word rlog, O.H.G. urlac, M.H.G. urlone, Dutch orlog, had special reference to a man's fate in war. Hence Orlogschiffe ...
— The Younger Edda - Also called Snorre's Edda, or The Prose Edda • Snorre
... wise, not only for the superior ability of the appointee as a jurist, but for his broad humanity as a man, fully recognizing the inviolability of human life and its subjection to law. For the Negro, his primal needs are protection and the common liberty vouchsafed to his fellow-countrymen. To enjoy them it is necessary that he be in harmony with his environments. A bulwark he must have, of a friendship not the product ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... and strikes the Rhone Valley at a place called Ulrichen. That is how a bird would do it, if some High Pope of Birds lived in Rome and needed visiting, as, for instance, the Great Auk; or if some old primal relic sacred to birds was connected therewith, as, for instance, the bones of the Dodo.... But I digress. The point is that the straight line takes one over the Brienzer Grat, over the lake, and then over the Wetterhorn. That was manifestly impossible. But whatever ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... 3: The existence of truth in general is self-evident but the existence of a Primal Truth is not ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... 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
... same space of time, from the moment when Gayomaritan, the type of humanity, began to find himself struggling against the hostility of the Evil Spirit up to the death of Yima. This is the system adopted by the Bundehesh. The history of the sin which made Yima lose his primal happiness, and subjected him to the power of the adversary, still remains connected with the name of that hero. But this transgression is no longer the original sin; and in order to be able to attribute it to the ancestors whence all humanity springs, its story is again told here (subserving ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... true. Indeed they are inevitable. They abide, and form a glowing background for all subsequent pictures, toned more austerely, and painted in more lasting hues of truth upon the brain. Those have never felt Venice at all who have not known this primal rapture, or who perhaps expected more of colour, more of melodrama, from a scene which nature and the art of man have made the richest in these qualities. Yet the mood engendered by this first experience is not destined to be permanent. It contains an element of ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... I had come up from my warm bunk at midnight to sit alone on the taffrail, listening in the keen air to the howling that made me shiver, spite of myself, and watching in the vague moonlight to understand if possible what the brutes felt amid the primal silence and desolation. ...
— Northern Trails, Book I. • William J. Long
... quivering expulsion of force. It was a perilous ride down that red slope, not so much from the hissing bullets as from the washes and gullies which Silvermane sailed over in magnificent leaps. Hare thrilled with savage delight in the wonderful prowess of his desert king, in the primal instinct of joy at escaping with the ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... 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 result of the war, if the northern armies ...
— Up From Slavery: An Autobiography • Booker T. Washington
... are speaking of is really one of the primal instincts is the very first fact that archæology vouches for. Of many lost races, such as the Aztecs and Toltecs, for instance, we have no historical traces save those which are furnished by testimonials of their reverence for ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... to-morrow are words of no meaning. I know I fell into what we call the past and the things I counted as dead for ever were the things I had yet to endure. Out of the old age of earth I stepped into its childhood, and received once more the primal blessing of youth, ecstasy, and beauty. But these things are too vast and vague to speak of; the words we use to-day cannot tell their story. Nearer to our time is the ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... two real motor cars, with genuine chauffeurs and passengers, raced uproariously across the stage. That is realism in its nakedness. That is realism reduced to its first principles. Realistic "effects," however speciously beautiful they may be, invariably tend to realism of that primal type, which satisfies the predilections of the groundling, and reduces drama to the level ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... the primal icy years Scraped slowly o'er the Puritans' hopes and fears, Like as great glaciers built of frozen tears, The Voice from far within the secret sky Said, 'Blood of Faith ye have? So; let us try.' And presently The anxious-masted ships that westward fare, ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... adventitious circumstances, but the essential traits of his being. Now this supposition is entirely valid. All we know of mankind justifies the statement that, as regards all the qualities and motives with which the primal sympathies deal, men are remarkably alike. Their loves, hates, fears, and sorrows are alike in their essentials; so that the postulate of sympathy that the other man is essentially like one's self is ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... the earliest appeal to the child's eyes, and we can use them for our educational play. The duplicate set of worsted balls of the seven primal colors can be increased to include easily distinguishable shades. The child can be sent on entertaining voyages of discovery around the room with a ball of a certain color to find other objects similar in color in the rugs, ...
— What the Mother of a Deaf Child Ought to Know • John Dutton Wright
... Primal Cause, the Causing Cause, why crave for more? Why strive its depth and breadth to mete, to trace its work, ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... Lurking 'twixt lid and eye-ball in the dark. Mocked I thee not in every guise of life, Hid in girls' eyes, a naiad in her well, Wooed through their laughter, and like echo fled, Luring thee down the primal silences Where the heart hushes and the flesh is dumb? Nay, was not I the tide that drew thee out Relentlessly from the detaining shore, Forth from the home-lights and the hailing voices, Forth from the last faint headland's failing line, Till I enveloped thee from verge to verge And hid thee ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton
... satisfying? Not I, oh God, not I! I'm no exceptional creature. I'm just a plain woman. And if life doesn't give me wifehood and motherhood, it gives me nothing. I wonder if all women feel this way. This pretty little Lena,—is she bursting with primal need of giving and taking? At any rate she has put something in Dick's face that was never there before—that I'd give my soul to see in a man's face when he ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... emotion, Half enraptured, half dismayed, Just escaped her earthly vesture, Trembling greets thy glimmering shade: Where, O joy! no misty mantle Veils her primal purity; And her immaterial pinions, Like an ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... uncivilized? The object of a great drama is to exhibit men not as they appear in the ordinary affairs of life, but while subject to those fiery tests under which all that is foreign or acquired melts away, and the primal components of the character are revealed in their bareness and in their depths. Othello's race is the hinge on which the tragedy turns. It throws a fatality on that marriage which seems unnatural even to those who yet do ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... 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 ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... branches, and even when there is none, the falling of some giant too old to subsist longer breaks the silence, frightens the wild beast, who retires growling. The sea conveys the same sense of primal solitude as the forest, but it is less silent; the sea tears among the rocks as if it would destroy the land, but when its rage is over the sea laughs, and leaps, and caresses, and the day after fawns upon the land, drawing itself up like ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... natural 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 ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... under a different title. When he is seen in the primal glory, as described in Ezekiel 28:11-19, he bears the earthly title of "The King of Tyrus" and when fallen from that sphere, he bears the heavenly title of "Lucifer, Son of the Morning." It is as though, being out of harmony with the Creator by his sin, he is out of harmony ...
— Satan • Lewis Sperry Chafer
... Wamba and Gurth with an added sauce-piquante from Dean Trench. We admit that we allude to that original composition of English past and present from a Latin and a Teutonic stock. But that is to us not an ultimate, but a primal fact. It is the premise from which we propose to trace out the principle now living and working in our present speech. We commence our history with that strife of the tongues which had at the outset also their battle of Hastings, their field of Sanilac. There began ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... humane, do I Not counsel aspirations high, So much as sweet and regular Use of the good in which we are. As when a man along the ways Walks, and a sudden music plays, His step unchanged, he steps in time, So let your Grace with Nature chime. Her primal forces burst, like straws, The bonds of uncongenial laws. Right life is glad as well as just, And, rooted strong in 'This I must,' It bears aloft the blossom gay And zephyr-toss'd, of 'This I may;' Whereby the complex heavens rejoice In fruits of uncommanded ...
— The Victories of Love - and Other Poems • Coventry Patmore
... the Punic Wars. Granted that the tired and hungry citizens of New York, jostling one another in their efforts to board a homeward train, present an unlovely spectacle; but do they, as Mr. Page affirms, reveal "such sheer and primal brutality as can be found nowhere else in the world where men and women are together?" Crowds will jostle, and have always jostled, since men first clustered in communities. Read Theocritus. The hurrying Syracusans—third ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... The primal woman hungers for the man; My better self demands the mate of me; The spirit fate of me, ...
— The Englishman and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... of English poets, in whom the love of beauty is supreme, cannot keep long to the primal elements of beauty; the higher flight is inevitable for him. And how much does not the appeal to things in argosy transferred from Fez, reinforced with the reference to Samarcand and especially to the authorized beauties of the ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... will see the advisability of returning to the policy of the church prevalent before the Council of Trent, and will allow a wiser freedom to his spiritual subjects in this matter of divorce. Hearts were created before creeds, and the primal laws of God still possess, and exert in emergencies, their ancient vigor ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... America," he went on suddenly, "to whom the future belongs; you are so vigorous and vulgar and uncultured. Life has become once more the primal fight for bread. Of course the dollar is a complicated form of the food the cave man killed for and slunk after, and the means of combat are different, but it is as brutal. From that crude animal brutality comes all the vigor of life. We have none ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... from the polite, have a hypothesis of evolution which postulates only a few rudimentary forms of life, a marine environment, and the minimum of supernormal assistance in the way of stimulating the primal forms in the direction of more highly differentiated developments. "The rudimentary forms, Inapertwa, were in reality stages in the transformation of various plants and animals into human beings. . . . They had no distinct limbs or organs ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... 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. ...
— A Full Description of the Great Tornado in Chester County, Pa. • Richard Darlington
... 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. ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... oceans have always had the same relative position as now; that is to say, the continents have followed a definite plan in their development. The very first part of North America to appear above the waters of the primal sea clearly outlined the shape of the future continent. Mr. Dana assures us that our continent developed with almost the regularity of a flower. Prof. Hitchcock also points out that the surface area of the very first period outlined the shape of the continent. "The ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... features to express, Likewise your soul's chaste whiteness, I'd take the primal essences ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... brightly well, 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 the darkness. Well, ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various
... followed the same mood of fancy, it would he more difficult to imagine what awful hint or wild picture of the universe called forth that primal persecution, what secret of sensational thought lies buried under the brutal stones. For in our time the blasphemies are threadbare. Pessimism is now patently, as it always was essentially, more commonplace than ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... Master's reputation for lonely pride and forgiving laughter; John Gould Fletcher, with an eloquence found nowhere else in his work, likens Lincoln to a tree so mighty that its branches reach the heavens and its roots the primal rock and nations of men may rest in its shade; Edgar Lee Masters, whose work is full of the shadow and light of Lincoln, has made his most moving lyric an epitaph upon Ann Rutledge, the girl Lincoln loved and ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... has represented more splendidly the great primal connection between Wollen and Sollen in the character of the individual. A person, from the point of view of his character, should: he is restricted, destined to some definite course; but as a man, he wills. He is unlimited and demands freedom of choice. At once there arises ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Scotland even after the coming of Tennyson and Browning. This spirit is manifested both in the preservation of the English ballad and in the creation of local songs. Illiterate people, and people cut off from newspapers and books, isolated and lonely,—thrown back on primal resources for entertainment and for the expression of emotion,—utter themselves through somewhat the same character of songs as did their forefathers of perhaps a thousand years ago. In some such way have been made and preserved the cowboy songs and other ...
— Cowboy Songs - and Other Frontier Ballads • Various
... I faint! I flinch from the raw agony! I cannot face this common human throe! Ah! Ah! the crude stab of reality! I am a son, and I have killed my mother! Why! I am now no more than him who tills Or reaps: and I am seized by primal pangs. Mother! [He drinks. The thunder crieth motherless. Ah! how this sword of lightning thrusts at me! O, all the artist in my soul is shattered, And I am hurled into humanity, Back to the sweat and heart-break of mankind. I am broken upon the jagged spurs of the earth. I can ...
— Nero • Stephen Phillips
... 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 ...
— A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul • George MacDonald
... with 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 ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... very dawn of Time Beheld thee sculptured from the living rock! Still wears thy face its primal look sublime, Surviving all the hoary ages' shock: Still royal art thou in thy proud repose, As when the sun on tuneful ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... it was trite and tiresome centuries ago, that saying about one finding one's greatest happiness in making others happy. But it has never ceased to be true; it never will cease to be true; it is one of those primal principles of humanity that no use nor law nor logic can ever hope ...
— Burnham Breaker • Homer Greene
... 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 answered every purpose of paradise to me; and the climate, in ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... back the hour Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower; We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind, In the primal sympathy Which, ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... 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
... robe of 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 might ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... crustal folding, the heat of radioactivity has been a determining factor. We recognise in the movements of the sediments not only an influence localising and accelerating crustal movements, but one which, in subservience to the primal distribution of land and water, has determined some of the greatest geographical ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... 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 ...
— Mornings in Florence • John Ruskin
... fears and suspicions he set far from him, and remembered nothing save that she was the woman for whom yearned all the depths of his soul as by pre-ordained decree. And she, too, for man, to her strange, aloof, mysterious, but dominating all her life as though by primal necessity. ...
— The Bittermeads Mystery • E. R. Punshon
... connection with the cold easterly winds before referred to as prevailing there at intervals, together with the severe changes (and which, it should not be forgotten, add to the quantity of moisture), may be ascribed the primal ...
— Minnesota; Its Character and Climate • Ledyard Bill
... 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 ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... reasons why I present it. For these reasons I call upon them now to restrain the growth of evil passion, and to bring back the public sense as far as in them lies, by earnest and united effort, if it may be, to crown our country with peace, and start it once more in its primal channel on a career of ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... world 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), can ask ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... believed that humanity is capable of better impulses than it ordinarily exhibits, and his life was devoted to calling forth generous and charitable sentiments in men. Whether through stoicism, which is the beautifying of the individual soul, or through divine and all-embracing love, which is the primal social virtue, Galds worked in a spirit of the purest self-sacrifice for the betterment of his nation and of humanity. He had grasped a truth which Goethe knew, but which Ibsen and his followers overlooked—that the ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... infer infinite gradations of existence, and to people all space with intelligence and will-power; and, if so, we have no difficulty in believing that for so noble a purpose as the progressive development of higher and higher intelligences, those primal and general will-forces, which have sufficed for the production of the lower animals, should have been guided into new channels and made to converge in definite directions. And if, as seems to me probable, this has been done, I cannot admit that it in any degree ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... the clear-watered river, and they sang of the young spirit that lives in this old earth so deceptively, defacing it with false scars of age, and craftily permitting us to count years by the thousand, yet remaining always as fresh in itself as on the primal morning when the world was found good by that ill-fated but joyous first pair of lovers. I marvel that so many are fooled by the trick; how so few of us detect that the soul of it all is ageless—has never even wearied. The blossoms told this secret now in quiet triumph ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... Jove's great sister?[5]— No, it could not have been then, For the fact of their partition Shows that heaven and earth then were, Shows that sea and land existed:— The beginning then must be Something more remote and distant: He who has expressly said 'The beginning,' must have hinted At the primal cause of all things, At the first and great beginning, All things growing out of HIM, He himself the pre-existent:— Yes, but then a new beginning Must we seek for this beginner, And so on ad infinitum; ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... pictures this comparable adult a serious and inventive writer engaged in congenial literary activities in a private retreat. We see this period marked by the creation of some of the most virile passages of a Work dealing exclusively in red corpuscles and huge primal impulses. We see this thoughtful man dragged from his calm seclusion to a horrifying publicity; forced to adopt the stage and, himself a writer, compelled to exploit the repulsive sentiments of an author not only personally distasteful to him but whose whole method ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... are always the merry," the lighthearted, free from care and worry, who sing, or dance, or play because of their superabundance of vital energy, and because in so doing they are in harmony with the primal laws ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... upon this moving platform these men seized it, bound it into sheaves, and threw it upon the field. Simple as this procedure seemed it really worked a revolution in agriculture; for the first time since the pronouncement of the primal curse, the farmer abandoned his hunchback attitude and did his work standing erect. Yet this device also had its disqualifications, the chief one being that it converted the human sheaf-binder into a sweat-shop worker. It was necessary ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... city, ignorant of the tricks which were constantly being employed in politics to effect one end or another, were greatly cheered by this so-called "public uprising." They little knew the pawns they were in the game, or how little sincerity constituted the primal impulse. ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... kindred calm, and the sweet breeze That makes the green leaves dance, shall waft a balm To thy sick heart. Thou wilt find nothing here Of all that pained thee in the haunts of men, And made thee loathe thy life. The primal curse Fell, it is true, upon the unsinning earth, But not in vengeance. God hath yoked to guilt Her pale tormentor, misery. Hence, these shades Are still the abodes of gladness; the thick roof Of green and stirring branches is alive And musical with birds, that sing and sport In wantonness of spirit; ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... in thy form and face, Thy looks and ways, of primal harmony; A certain soothing charm, a vital grace That breathes of the eternal womanly, And makes me feel the warmth of Nature's breast, When in her arms, and thine, I ...
— Music and Other Poems • Henry van Dyke
... timid to defend himself. John Flint knew his own weakness, knew what he could expect at Jan's hands, and it made him cool, collected, wary, and deadly. He was no more the mild-mannered, soft-spoken Butterfly Man, but another and a more primal creature, fighting for his life. Big Jan, indeed, fancied he had nobody but the Butterfly Man to deal with; as a matter of fact he was tackling ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... o'er the deep; Brightest of beings, greatest of the great, Who, not as mortals steep Their eyes in dewy sleep, But heavenly pensive on the lotus lay, That blossom'd at his touch, and shed a golden ray. Hail, primal blossom! hail, empyreal gem, Kemel, or Pedma, [1] or whate'er high name Delight thee, say. What four-formed godhead came, With graceful stole and beamy diadem, Forth ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... The moment was primal; the intensity of it was like a rapier- thrust, down through her fury to the quick of womanly consciousness; she shrank back. "Don't," she said, faintly; "don't—" For one instant she forgot that she hated David. ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... bright Be now forever taken from my sight, Though nothing can bring back the hour Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower; We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind; In the primal sympathy Which, having been, must ever be; In the soothing thoughts that spring Out of human suffering; In the faith that looks through death, In years that bring the ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... Spain and Portugal. I have a passion for Gothic architecture, and a leaning towards the magnificence of the old religion, the foster-mother of all that is finest and highest in art, and if I have such a thing as a literary project, it is to write a romance, of which Reading Abbey in its primal magnificence should form a part, not the least about forms of faith, understand, but as an element of the picturesque, and as embodying a very grand and influential part of bygone days. At present I have just finished (since writing Country Stories, which people seem so good ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... case of plants like the tomato, which are propagated by seed, from what they do with plants like the apple and strawberry, which are propagated by division. In the latter case all the plants of the variety are but parts of the primal origination, and so are alike. A description is simply a more or less complete and accurate definition of what a certain immutable thing really is, but in the case of plants propagated by seed the variety is made up of all the plants which accord with a certain ideal. Bailey ...
— Tomato Culture: A Practical Treatise on the Tomato • William Warner Tracy
... principle, namely, your own species, is characterized by a great number of specialized organs. Through this very specialization of functions, however, you have forfeited your individual immortality, and it has come about that only your life-stream is immortal. The primal cell is inherently immortal, but death follows in the wake ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... Kennon looked at George through the bars and the humanoid glared back, his eyes bright with hatred. Kennon felt the short hairs prickle along the back of his neck. George roused a primal emotion—an elemental dislike that was deeper than reason—an antagonism intensely physical, almost overpowering—a purely adrenal response that had no business in the make-up of ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... will have in common with other seaside places is a parade. At first Stella wouldn't hear of having one; but Norty told her there's "a deep-seated primal instinct in human nature for sitting on benches and watching one's fellow-creatures walk up and down, and it would not be wise to thwart this instinct." He's an enormously clever boy, and, when it was put to her like that, Stella gave in. So ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 6, 1914 • Various
... 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
... the history of its genesis, we alike find, as we might have antecedently expected, that it is dependent on our more ultimate idea of mind as mind; the conception of causality is not, as a matter of fact, original or primal, but derivative or secondary. Therefore, if this conception necessarily involves the postulation of a first cause, there can be no doubt that such a cause can only be conceived as of the nature of mind. From which it follows that each individual mind requires to be regarded—if it is regarded ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... causes of migration are primal and most important, and since like causes played such a large part in giving rise to this recent movement, it might be well to pause here to enumerate some of these causes, and to note briefly the nature of the same. In the first place, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... will, and it dare not leave to the choice, or even to the conscience, of the individual an option as to which of its commands shall be obeyed, and which not. To do so would be to loose the bands of society, to bring to an end the reign of law, and to plunge the community once again into that primal chaos of anarchy from which in the beginning it painfully emerged. The State demands, and must necessarily demand, implicit obedience. From the loyal it receives it. Those from whom it does not receive it are rebels, no matter how conscientious they may be, ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... fullness Himself. He who is in the body is ever athirst, for he pursues that which is in part: But ever there wells forth deeper and deeper the sound "He is this—this is He"; fusing love and renunciation into one. Kabr says: "O brother! that is the Primal Word." ...
— Songs of Kabir • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... 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; ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... both syllables short in such words as, "advent, sinner, supper," and then give "sermon, filter, spirit, gather," and the like, for regular trochees, with "the first syllable long, and the second short," as does this author? What more contradictory and confused, than to pretend that the primal sound of a vowel lengthens an unaccented syllable, and accent on the consonant shortens an accented one, as if in "also" the first syllable must be short and the second long, and then be compelled, by the evidence of one's senses to mark "echo" as a trochee, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... remember the gene of similar constraints! George draws from this inferences of the wisdom of Nature in confiding the duties of maternity to young creatures, whose pulses have not yet lost the impatient leap of early pleasure and energy, and to whom repose and reflection have not yet become the primal necessities of life. This want of the nearness and sympathy of age she was to experience more, as, by the consent of both parties, her education was to be conducted under the superintendence of her grandmother, from whom the mother derived her pension, and whose ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... the wall. Had it ever yet befallen any young woman in the world to wish with secret intensity that she might have been, for her convenience, a shade less inordinately pretty? She had come to that, to this view of the bane, the primal curse, of their lavish physical outfit, which had included everything and as to which she lumped herself resentfully with her mother. The only thing was that her mother was, thank goodness, still so much prettier, still so assertively, so publicly, so trashily, ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... nothing can bring back the hour Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower. We will grieve not—rather find Strength in what remains behind; In the primal sympathy Which having been, must ever be. In the soothing thoughts that spring Out of human suffering! In the faith that looks through death— In years, that bring the ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... buried love to second life arise; Again his love must lose, through too much love, Must lose his life by living life too true; For what he sought below has passed above, Already done is all that he would do; Must tune all being with his single lyre; Must melt all rocks free from their primal pain, Must search all nature with his one soul's fire; Must bind anew all forms in heavenly chain: If he already sees what he must do, Well may he shade his eyes ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... 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 who ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... his glance lingered on his bulky adversary with odd, persistent exhilaration, as if after all that had gone before, this contest royal, which promised to become one of sheer brute strength, awoke to its utmost a primal fighting force in him. "Do you know the penalty for attempting that game, Tom ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... a well-ascertained fact that, in the main, the influence exerted by the clergy on the formation of modern European kingdoms was in favor of a well- regulated freedom based on the first law—the law of God—that primal source of true liberty and civilization? To the clergy, certainly, and to the monks, is chiefly due the abolition of slavery; and the bishops took a very active and prominent part in the movements of the communes, to which the Third Estate ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... type of 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... reason I dare, to you, my only wish make known. The babe who grew to angelhood in heaven, I never watched unfold from child to man. And so I ask, that unto me be given That motherhood, which was God's primal plan. ...
— Poems of Progress • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... fire. The third was called the Dark Lord, and he was the ruler of the water. The fourth was known as the Wood Prince, and he was the ruler of the wood. The fifth was called the Mother of Metals, and ruled over them. These five Ancients set all their primal spirit into motion, so that water and earth sank down. The heavens floated upward, and the earth grew firm in the depths. Then they allowed the waters to gather into rivers and seas, and hills and plains made their appearance. So the heavens opened and the earth was divided. And there ...
— The Chinese Fairy Book • Various
... the Divine Logos. The more perfect emanation of God is in one view the power by which He directs the physical creation, in another the perfect law which He set up as the model of conduct for His highest creatures. The rabbis, indeed, were prone to glorify the law as the primal creation of God, and the instrument of all the later creations, [Hebrew: kli hmra shbu gbrao shmim].[212] They speak of it as the light, the pillar, and the bond of the universe, the model whereon the architect looked;[213] and ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... of every character study in the Scriptures, he was competent to grasp the Pilgrim Fathers and all historical innovators, but Sarah Penn was beyond him. He could deal with primal cases, but parallel ones worsted him. But, after all, although it was aside from his province, he wondered more how Adoniram Penn would deal with his wife than how the Lord would. Everybody shared the wonder. When Adoniram's four new cows arrived, Sarah ordered three to ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... 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 Matter, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... has encroached a little upon the land, and that some 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 existed ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... 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 had adopted us, investing us with ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... 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 without ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... Morality in its springs is absolutely one with that clinging to life which is the most deep-lying of all interests, and with that relish for life in which its goodness needs no philosopher's approval. The primal determination to be and to sell one's self dearly, is not different, except in its limits, from the moral determination to be and to attain to the uttermost. The whole force of life is behind every moral scruple, and guarantees the sanity even of ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... no reference has been made to the Eskimos, who are popularly considered a race apart from the Indians. The best authorities now believe that they are a strictly American race, whose primal home was to the south of the Hudson Bay, whence they spread northward to Labrador, Greenland, and Alaska.[254] I have reserved them for separate consideration because they admirably illustrate the grand truth just formulated, that a race may have made considerable progress in ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... agreement between sovereign states. There was no pretence that it 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, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... from her heart that rise, My soul remembers its lost Paradise, And antenatal gales blow from Heaven's shores of spice; I grow essential all, uncloaking me From this encumbering virility, And feel the primal sex of heaven and poetry: And parting from her, in me linger on ...
— Poems • Francis Thompson
... not fear death—with the memory of his murdered mate still fresh in his mind he almost courted it, yet strong within him was that primal instinct of self-preservation—the battling force of life that would keep him an active contender against the Great Reaper until, fighting to the very last, he should be overcome by a ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... admire scratching and false stopping, together with sundry other things of the same nature, would have experienced wild joy upon hearing Beethoven's "Violin Concerto" as it was played by Wieniawski; but for those who regard a correct intonation as a thing of primal importance, it could not have been pleasing. Wieniawski belongs to that school of which Ole Bull is a prominent member, whose first article of belief is that genuine passion and fervour is signified by ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... 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
... primal purpose of our system of education, instructors should seek to mould the character of their pupils. Supervisors and committee-men should require a faithful discharge of this trust. When they come to examine the school, if the ...
— Reflections on the Operation of the Present System of Education, 1853 • Christopher C. Andrews
... because he violated truth and equity, and the nation's good, that he opposed him. Cromwell usurped his prerogatives, and violated the English constitution; but he did not transgress those great primal principles of truth, for which constitutions are made. He looked beyond constitutions to abstract laws of justice; and it never can be laid to his charge that he slighted these, or proved a weak or wicked ruler. He quarrelled with parliament, ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... code merely for the regulation of outward conduct. It is the moral law—the primal standard of righteousness established by the Creator for His creatures. There is not an impulse of the inmost soul that is not reached by it. It is the word which, living and powerful, is "sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer
... ears, blinded the eyes, dulled and numbed the mind, with its roar, with the chaff and dust of its whirlwind passage, with the stupefying sense of its power, coeval with the earthquake and glacier, merciless, all-powerful, a primal basic throe of creation itself, ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... the primal motion of unknown powers, like electricity, for instance, is spiral. Have you ever seen it winding out of a pair of human eyes, knowing that every fresh coil was a spring of the soul, and felt it fixing itself deeper ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... freed of dust by the wet weather, and full of sweet airs. Far in front the foot-hills rose through the rain, indefinite and mystic. I wanted no speech with any one, nor to be near human beings at all. I was steeped in a revery as of the primal earth; even thoughts themselves had almost ceased motion. To lie down with wild animals, with elk and deer, would have made my waking dream complete; and since such dream could not be, the cattle around the deserted buildings, ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... continues: "Ever remember that thou, and all that thou beholdest within and around thee, all that befalls thee and others, is no disjointed fragment, no wild chaos of atoms or casualties, but that, following eternal law, it springs from the one primal source of all life, all reason, and all good: this is the essence of religion" (pp. 277-78). Out of that "one primal source," however, all ruin and irrationality, all evil flows as well, and its name, according to ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... America, I felt that it was a 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 at the head of the 'Father of Waters.' Schoolcraft, finally, in 1832, decided ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... humour for you. The Sublime takes off its hat to the Ridiculous. Send a cartridge clashing into the breech and speculate about the Absolute. Keep one eye on your sights and the other on Cosmos. Blow the reek of burned powder from before you so you may look over the edge of the abyss of the Great Primal Cause. Duck to the whistle of a bullet and commune with Schopenhauer. Perhaps I am a little mad. Perhaps I am supremely intelligent. But in either case I am not understandable to myself. How, then, be understandable to others? If these sheets of paper, this incoherence, ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... them. So, during the days of her short political eclipse that followed in a palace that had housed a hundred kings, I saw her almost daily in a room—her holy of holies—where the gods of ancient India were depicted in three primal colors working miracles all over the walls and where, if governments had only known it, she was already again devising plans to set the world ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... then glide among the unchanging Asiatic communities, especially the Oriental isles to the east of the continent—those insulated, immemorial, unalterable countries, which even in these modern days still preserve much of the ghostly aboriginalness of earth's primal generations, when the memory of the first man was a distinct recollection, and all men his descendants, unknowing whence he came, eyed each other as real phantoms, and asked of the sun and the moon why they were created and to what end; when though, according to Genesis, ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... comes fairly close to my idea of a good book," she writes. "No possible harm can be done any one in reading it. The book can, and does, present a hundred pictures that will draw any reader in closer touch with nature and the Almighty, my primal object in each line I write. The human side of the book is as close a character study as I am capable of making. I regard the character of Mrs. Comstock as the best thought-out and the cleanest-cut study of human nature I have so far been able to do. Perhaps the best ...
— At the Foot of the Rainbow • Gene Stratton-Porter
... 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 ...
— Masonic Monitor of the Degrees of Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft and Master Mason • George Thornburgh
... 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 ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... at first, it proved a bagatelle. Start not my lord; there are those who have measured Mardi by perch and pole, and with their wonted lead sounded its utmost depths. Listen: it is a pleasant story. The coral wall which circumscribes the isles but continues upward the deep buried crater of the primal chaos. In the first times this crucible was charged with vapors nebulous, boiling over fires volcanic. Age by age, the fluid thickened; dropping, at long intervals, heavy sediment to the bottom; which layer on layer concreted, and at length, in crusts, rose toward the surface. Then, the vast volcano ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... with no recoil—from which ever flows back only purest water, sweet and cool; the one abyss of destroying love, into which all wrong tumbles, and finding no reaction, is lost, ceases for evermore? there, in its own cradle, the primal order is still nursed, still restored; thence is still sent forth afresh, to leaven with new life the world ever ageing! Shadowy and vague they were—but vaguely shadowed were thoughts like these in Janet's mind, as she ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... after reformation, there is a striving to conceal our unfaithfulness. The covering assumed by those who, in Scripture, stand as the parents of mankind, is the perpetual type of the subterfuges we all invent to hide our disobedience from our God, from our neighbors, nay, even from ourselves. The primal image and likeness of God has become so defaced, distorted, and broken, that it is often hard to find a remnant still testifying to its Divine origin. Let us rise up from among these shattered fragments, and contemplate for a while the means of bringing the poor, fallen human nature into harmony ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler |
