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Primal   /prˈaɪməl/   Listen
Primal

adjective
1.
Serving as an essential component.  Synonyms: cardinal, central, fundamental, key.  "The central cause of the problem" , "An example that was fundamental to the argument" , "Computers are fundamental to modern industrial structure"
2.
Having existed from the beginning; in an earliest or original stage or state.  Synonyms: aboriginal, primaeval, primeval, primordial.  "Primal eras before the appearance of life on earth" , "The forest primeval" , "Primordial matter" , "Primordial forms of life"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Primal" Quotes from Famous Books



... ed., 1889, pp. 21, 360, 795). As the simpler occurrences of inorganic nature and the more complicated phenomena of organic life are alike reducible to the same natural forces, and as, further, these in their turn have their common foundation in a simple primal principle pervading infinite space, we can regard this last (the cosmic ether) as all-comprehending divinity, and upon this found the thesis: "Belief in God is reconcilable with science." In this pantheistic view, and also in his criticism of a one-sided materialism, I entirely agree ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel

... 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 sent on ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... this grave hour—God help keep the President! To him all Lincoln's tenderness be lent, The grave, sweet nature of the man that saw Most power in peace and let no claptrap awe His high-poised duty from its primal plan Of rule supreme for the whole good ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association

... 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 hand Were thicker than itself ...
— Hamlet, Prince of Denmark • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]

... 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 ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various

... 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 ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace

... clear-cut; her mouth was strong and revealed between red, firm lips the even pearliness of her teeth. She was of medium height. In walking she had the free, light step of the highborn maidens who, in primal times, pressed the flowers as they passed without crushing them. But all her true grace seemed to be concentrated in her eyes, which were deep and of a dark blue. The impression she made upon a beholder was ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux

... the cold and silent Past! A relic to the present cast, Left on the ever-changing strand Of shifting and unstable sand, Which wastes beneath the steady chime And beating of the waves of Time! Who from its bed of primal rock First wrenched thy dark, unshapely block? Whose hand, of curious skill untaught, Thy ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... the most grotesque shapes. Many of these are colossal pillars, surmounted by boulders weighing many tons. The softer rock and gravel have washed down the ravines, leaving these as monuments of the primal ages. The ravines penetrate the mountain on every side, and little by little wear the monster away. The beavers choose the prettiest nooks in them for their villages, and the miner, finding the water cut off, often learns that in a single night these busy ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various

... 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 do so ...
— Amateur Gardencraft - A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover • Eben E. Rexford

... girl stood regarding her 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 and made ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory

... speak if it were not so hopeless to keep struggling in vain on behalf of a real reform. More depends on this than you realise. Would you restore all men to their primal duties, begin with the mothers; the results will surprise you. Every evil follows in the train of this first sin; the whole moral order is disturbed, nature is quenched in every breast, the home becomes gloomy, the spectacle of a ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau

... magnet. The world becomes another world in these mystic hours; it has new rulers and new laws—or rather, it has none. The moon sways more than ocean tides. In broad day Deb would no more have stalked a man than she would a crocodile; in this soft, free, empty, irresponsible night the primal woman was out of her husk, one with the desert-prowling animal that calls through the moonlit silence for its mate. Twenty times had she snubbed an ardent lover at the behest of all sorts of reasons and so-called instincts cultivated for her guidance ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge

... recite in simple words the actual occurrences, the text of the book is overlaid with unusual words and involved sentences, in which the statement of the same facts is lost in a cloud of phraseology of a very curious and original kind. "Primal success," "the expression of a stride," "the belligerence of the two armies," "philosophy of the victory," "palpable co-operation," "the expression of an insurrection,"—these are some of the odd inventions of the author; ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various

... Antaean strength In you, the great dynamic beat Of primal passions, and she sees In you the last besieged retreat Of love relentless, ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson

... took so long for a man to settle himself to his work he really could not explain. Not that his conscience did not sometimes suggest the answer, pointing to a certain slackness and softness in himself—the primal shrinking from work, the primal instinct to sit and dream—that had every day to be met and conquered afresh, before the student actually found himself in his chair, or lecturing from his desk with all his brains alert. Anyway, the Reader, when there was no college or university engagement ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... instant he had a distinct vision of Moran's life and character, shunning men and shunned of women, a strange, lonely creature, solitary as the ocean whereon she lived, beautiful after her fashion; as yet without sex, proud, untamed, splendid in her savage, primal independence—a thing untouched and unsullied by civilization. She seemed to him some Bradamante, some mythical Brunhilde, some Valkyrie of the legends, born out of season, lost and unfamiliar in this end-of-the-century time. Her purity was ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris

... of crazy dance that looked like an Indian cakewalk. Others tossed their hats in the air and shot holes through them as they fell to the ground. And all were laughing, crying, shouting, waving arms and head gear in a sort of wild, feverish, primal jubilation. ...
— The Outdoor Girls in the Saddle - Or, The Girl Miner of Gold Run • Laura Lee Hope

... 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 the less ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various

... 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

... code of monastic Christendom for centuries, had sanctified Work as one of the most effectual preservatives of the bodily and spiritual health of the ascetic, bringing together Laborare and Orare in friendly union, and proclaiming anew for the monk as for the untonsured citizen the primal ordinance, 'In the sweat of thy brow thou ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)

... empty. The ax went circling swiftly through the air, its head showing like a silver crescent against the gray twilight of the trees. It did not reach its tall objective, but fell among the undergrowth, shaking up a flying litter of birds. But in the poet's memory, full of primal things, something seemed to say that he had seen the birds of some pagan augury, the ax of some ...
— The Trees of Pride • G.K. Chesterton

... of kings and princes for rulers, and the people for passive and more or less obedient subjects. It was a great problem to be resolved how society should exist at all, and history gives us the solution of it. Despotism in politics and authority in religion was the grand, primal, leading, and executive idea of it. What learning and culture existed was confined to the guild of the ecclesiastics, and they, for the most part, ruled the rulers as well as the people, by virtue of their intelligence. It ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... beginning, and will continue to exist to all eternity; that though he was not born in sin, he is held by the secondary law of retribution accountable for offences committed in his person, and these he must expiate through subsequent transmigrations, until, by sublimation, he is absorbed again into the primal source of his being; and that mutability is an essential and absolute law ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens

... it just to thee, Olympus' king, That suffering mortals at thy doom should know By omens dire the massacre to come? Or did the primal parent of the world When first the flames gave way and yielding left Matter unformed to his subduing hand, And realms unbalanced, fix by stern decree' Unalterable laws to bind the whole (Himself, too, bound by law), so that for aye All Nature moves within its ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan

... each and every one of these transplanted Britons is tea, and this in its primal form. They can have no concern with Steel common. Amalgamated copper or Erie 4's, and to them the jargon of stock exchanges would be as meaningless as Sanskrit platitudes. Their speculative medium is tea—tea in bulk, and pretty ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield

... 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 no idle fancy but an established truth. It not only embodies the judgment of all men in thought ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... beginning, and will be to the end. It is only form and fashion which change; men remain the same. The men and women of the Bible talked nearly the same as we do, and seem to have had as great light on the primal principles of wisdom and truth and virtue. Who can improve on the sagacity and worldly wisdom of the Proverbs of Solomon? They have a perennial freshness, and appeal to universal experience. It is this fidelity to nature which is one of ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord

... for the insertion of this silly, sickening rhapsody of the old libertine, the author begs to state that he introduced it, (as well as other speeches of a like character,) for the purpose of painting, in strong colors, the disgusting lechery of a man, whose primal passions had degraded him to the level of a brute. He would also assure the reader that the character of old Tickels is drawn from a living original, whose real name sounds very much like the curious cognomen that has been assigned ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson

... confess to more or less misery. Its apparent source may be this or that; its real source is, to use a poor figure, a dislocation of the juncture between the created and the creating life. This primal evil is the parent of evils unnumbered, hence of miseries multitudinous, under the weight of which the arrogant man cries out against life, and goes on to misuse it, while the child looks around for help—and who shall help him but ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald

... 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 an ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton

... 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 avarice; the wealth of the country runs into the swamp of ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson

... this is the original form of all snowflakes, but that, when I observe these crystal stars falling around me, they are only just generated in the low mist next the earth. I am nearer to the source of the snow, its primal auroral, and golden hour of infancy; commonly the flakes reach us travel-worn and agglomerated, comparatively, without order or beauty, far down in their fall, like men in their advanced age. As for the circumstances under which this ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe

... important in influencing her genius. It was in the home days at Griff, the school days at Nuneaton nearby, that those deepest, most permanent impressions were absorbed which are given out in the finest of her fictions. Hence came the primal inspiration which produced her best. And it is because she drew most generously upon her younger life in her earlier works that it is they which are most likely to ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton

... side or 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 ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... eloquence. He is an adroit magician, able to assume almost any form at will, and impervious to any amount of ridicule and insult. Here we have, it appears, the elements of the story in Genesis; the primal Eden, the tempter in animal form, and the bringing of sorrow and death upon earth through the elemental sins of ...
— The Soul of the Indian - An Interpretation • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman

... Man, in this sense, has already conquered Nature; and has secured for his progeny however indefinitely increased, and for the frail and incompetent ones of his race, however indefinitely increased, a more than sufficient supply of these primal necessities. ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys

... 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, ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow

... 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

... intoxicating moment he 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

... 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, ...
— A Full Description of the Great Tornado in Chester County, Pa. • Richard Darlington

... mouthed by affectation, especially in the attempt to deal with words of which only half the meaning is understood or half the sound heard. Mrs. Gamp's "aperiently so"—and the "underminded" with primal sense of undermine, of—I forget which gossip, in the "Mill on the Floss," are master-and mistress-pieces in this latter kind. Mrs. Malaprop's "allegories on the banks of the Nile" are in somewhat higher order of mistake: Mrs. Tabitha Bramble's ignorance ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... a strange 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, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various

... question down to its primal cause," said grandfather, "if we bring it down to its primal cause, Mary is right; for the cause being iniquitous, of course, ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine

... 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. And once we have shaken off ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer

... ended; verily, through thousands of generations, through eternity, it endures; while the bad—perhaps not useless—is the chaff which is dispersed, and which has no result unless to hurry on the divine will. Our life is double. Shelley's atoms were to return to their primal elements. The unknown atoms or attributes of them were undoubtedly to carry on their work; he had ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti

... direct as a shaft of light. So quick are they that we are prone to disregard them in our contemplation of their results. We see the boy strike and conclude, in a superficial way, that his hand initiated the action, nor take pains to trace this action back to the primal cause in the spiritual impulse. True, both mind and body are called into action, but only as auxiliaries to carry out the behests of the spirit. When the man utters an exclamation of delight at sight of his country's flag in a ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson

... 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

... down upon the present, as through a skylight between the shadows, falls a clear, still radiance, like beams from an eye of blessing; and, within the circle of that divine illumination, beauty and goodness, truth and love, purity and cheerfulness blend like primal colors into the clear harmony of light. The author of Proverbial Philosophy has a passage not unworthy of note in this connection, when he speaks of the train which attends the ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... 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 their range when her ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald

... Thou better miracle, fair human love, That splendour shouldst have been of home and hearth, Now quenched by mortal hate! Whence come our woes But from our lusts? O desecrated law By God's own finger on our hearts engraved, How well art thou avenged! No dream it was, That primal greatness, and that primal peace: Man in God's image at the first was made, A God ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere

... however, followed sensation in those first terrific and bewildering weeks, much was happening that called forth with the utmost exuberance the primal emotions of mankind; there ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse

... humour of April frolics And bickers in blade and bough— O, to meet for the primal ...
— Hawthorn and Lavender - with Other Verses • William Ernest Henley

... with an infinite life, even the life of the Father; know that our existence is not the moonlight of a mere consciousness of being, but the sun-glory of a life justified by having become one with its origin, thinking and feeling with the primal Sun of life, from whom it was dropped away that it might know and bethink itself, and return to circle for ever in exultant harmony around him. Then indeed we are; then indeed we have life; the life of Jesus has, ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald

... root here than any aristocratic institution has in Europe; and politics is but the common pulse-beat, of which revolution is the fever-spasm. Yet we have seen European aristocracy survive storms which seemed to reach down to the primal strata of European life. Shall we, then, trust to mere politics, where even revolution has failed? How shall the stream rise above its fountain? Where shall our church organizations or parties get strength to attack their great parent and moulder, the slave power? Shall ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various

... circumstances. Some of them remind us of some of the best Proverbs of Solomon. In general, we should say that to his mind filial piety and fraternal submission were the foundation of all virtuous practices, and absolute obedience to rulers the primal principle of government. He was eminently a peace man, discouraging wars and violence. He was liberal and tolerant in his views. He said that the "superior man is catholic and no partisan." Duke Gae asked, "What should be done to secure ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord

... seems now—we two white men, gentlemen of quality, completely oblivious to blood, birth, tradition, breeding—our primal allegiance, our very individualities sunk in the mystical freemasonry of a savage tie which bound us to the two nations we assumed to speak for, Oneida and Delaware—two nations of the great Confederacy of the Iroquois that had adopted us, investing ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers

... "Thy wondrous song in melting strains To our mute hearts swift entrance gains; By magical yet unfelt force, We see creation's mighty course: The firmament appears in space— God breathes upon the water's face. One flashing word bids primal light appear, Revolving stars begin their vast career; Upheaving mountains now are seen, Tall trees and tender herbage green; Young animals to being rise, And animate by living cries; We hear the mighty thunder roar, And rains in gushing torrents pour. All creatures struggle into life; and ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach

... a moment, in a moment gone, They answered me, then left me still more lone; They told me that the thought which ruled the world As yet no sail upon its course had furled, That the creation was but just begun, New leaves still leaving from the primal one, But spoke not of the goal to which my ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... the group-ideas of the great herd, that without oneself doing any work, one may enrich oneself unrestrictedly, by means of craft, at the expense of the very poorest. Only the unprecedented magnitude of the herd and its unparalleled firm coherence made so great a deviation from Primal Reason conceivable ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden

... Many of these people have "dug-outs" or other boats on the adjacent river, some have bathing-sheds, and others padi plantations. These kampongs have much of the poetry as well as inanity of tropical life about them. They are beautiful and appropriate, and food is above them and around them. "The primal curse" can hardly be known. A very little labor provides all that the Malay desires, and if the tenure of the land be secure (and the lack of security is one of the great evils), and he be not over-taxed, his life must be calm and easy, if not happy. The people were always courteous, and ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)

... effort of the intellect to transcend itself, the finite must ever fail to comprehend the infinite. How much less then can words define that which even the whole phenomenal universe fails to express! The change from the One to the Many is not to be described. How the All-Deity becomes the primal Trinity, is the eternal problem set for man's solution. No system of religion or philosophy has ever explained this inexplicable mystery, for it cannot be understood by the embodied Soul, whose vision and comprehension are dulled by the grossness of ...
— Simon Magus • George Robert Stow Mead

... Nature, leading to the effort to observe and 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 possible to do it. These are the Athenian, ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin

... afflatus which gave us the Florentine campanile, and the Medici tombs, and the portrait of Monna Lisa. When we stand before any one of these masterpieces, we realise at a glance how keen must have been the primal insight, and how strenuous the effort necessary for the evolution of so consummate an achievement; and, with the savour of the Tenerumi di Vitello still fresh, I feel that it deserves to be added to the list of Italian capo lavori. Now, as ...
— The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste: - Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes • Mrs. W. G. Waters

... gave you, in which to develop your soul, in coddling selfish brats, and kitchen-work. There are homes where men and women enfranchise themselves from the cursed laws of society,—Phalansteries,—where each soul develops itself out of the inner centre of eternal truth and love according to its primal bent, free to yield to its instincts and affinities. I learned their theory long ago, but I never believed in it until now. We will go there, Grey. We will be governed by the laws of our own nature. It will be a free, beautiful life, my own. Music and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... of Hindu philosophy is the philosophy of Kapila, generally known as the Sankhya system. This teaching opposes the Atomic Theory of the Vaisheshika system, and holds that the atoms are not indestructible nor eternal, but may be resolved back into a primal substance called Prakriti. Prakriti is held to be an universal, eternal energy or ethereal substance, something similar to certain Western scientific conceptions of an Universal Ether. From this eternal, universal energy, Kapila held that all the universe has been evolved—all ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson

... of his voyages and migrations, the distribution of animals and plants on which he must depend. These conditions he has shared with all forms of life from the amoeba to the civilized nation. The earth's superficial area is the primal and immutable condition of earth-born, earth-bound man; it is the common soil whence is sprung our common humanity. Nations belong to countries and races to continents, but humanity belongs to the whole world. Naught ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple

... be the child's name? It should be the name of one of those princes who drank out of the same wine-cup with the primal ancestor of the House of Karpathy on the fair plains of Hunnia. It should be Zoltan—Zoltan Karpathy—how beautifully that ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai

... meditated—a miserable man. Whither should he go? "He that is accursed, let him be accursed still," was the pitiless anathema written in this spoliated effort of his new-born solicitousness. A man who has spent his primal strength in journeying in one direction has not much spirit left for reversing his course. Troy had, since yesterday, faintly reversed his; but the merest opposition had disheartened him. To turn about would have been hard enough under the greatest providential encouragement; but to find ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy

... abrupt, imperative. The high lamps cast strange shadows on their lost faces. The voices grew hoarse, dropped to low growls, their faces changed from ferocity to a mournful solemnity until they looked even more like primal men than before; but they continued their marching and stamping until Gora, who, with the other women, had begun to fear that the rhythm would bring down the house, had the inspiration to insert a Caruso ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... points out, in fact, that there is a remarkable similarity between the lunar volcanoes and those in the immediate neighbourhood of the Pacific Ocean. He goes even further to suggest that Australia is another portion of the primal crust which was detached out of the region now occupied by the Indian Ocean, where it was originally connected with the south of India or ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage

... serious air of delicate zest, as though he were presiding benevolently at some work of charity and mercy. He had certainly flourished on his idleness like a green bay tree! Hugh was inclined to believe in the necessity to happiness of the observance of some primal laws, like the law of labour, but here was a contradiction to all his theories. He sighed to think of the mountains of carefully prepared food that this rosy, well-brushed person must have consumed in the course of his life! He was a notoriously selfish man, who never laid ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson

... 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 me ...
— The Sisters' Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... work of Aleardi was Le Prime Storie (Primal Histories), in which he traces the course of the human race through the Scriptural story of its creation, its fall, and its destruction by the deluge, through the Greek and Latin days, through the darkness and glory of the feudal times, down to our own,—following ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells

... watch in the night that has passed, and we now realize that historical movements are almost without exception the resultants of many motives. We have come to recognize that men have always misapprehended themselves, contradicted themselves, obeyed primal impulses, and then deluded themselves with sophistications upon the springs of action. In a word, unaware of what they are doing, men allow their aesthetic and dramatic senses to shape their conceptions of ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson

... judicial decisions, and the utterances of campaign orators, continually falling back to the old ground, are bundles of contradictions on this vital question. Inasmuch as we are, first, citizens of the United States, and second, of the State wherein we reside, the primal rights of all citizens should be regulated by the national government, and complete equality in civil and political rights everywhere secured. When women are denied the right to enter institutions of learning, and practice ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

... of the murdered person, is an incident of coarse and vulgar horror; and for this reason, that it flings the interest exclusively upon the natural but ignoble instinct by which we cleave to life; an instinct, which, as being indispensable to the primal law of self-preservation, is the same in kind, (though different in degree,) amongst all living creatures; this instinct therefore, because it annihilates all distinctions, and degrades the greatest of men to the level of "the poor beetle that ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey

... manifold, subtle, living, immanent in all things, permanent, flowing, self-manifesting; that the universe is the result of mind; that nature is the symbol of mind; that finite minds live and act through concurrence with infinite mind. His second is the connection of the individual intellect with the primal mind and its ability to draw thence wisdom, will, virtue, prudence, heroism, all active ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta

... hog-mind and its handmaidens in disorder, superficial brightness, fundamental dullness, then cowardice and suspicion—all a part of the minority (the non-people) the antithesis of everything called soul, spirit, Christianity, truth, freedom—will give way more and more to the great primal truths—that there is more good than evil, that God is on the side of the majority (the people)—that he is not enthusiastic about the minority (the non-people)—that he has made men greater than man, that ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives

... next day we hired a fly-coach—for a chaise could never have held us and my father's books—and jogged through a labyrinth of villanous lanes which no Marshal Wade had ever reformed from their primal chaos. But poor Mrs. Primmins and the canary-bird alone seemed sensible of the jolts; the former, who sat opposite to us wedged amidst a medley of packages, all marked "Care, to be kept top uppermost" (why I know not, for they were but books, and whether they lay top or ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... Hanafiyyah or orthodox belief, which he subsequently named Al-Islam, was first taught by Allah, in all its purity and perfection, to Adam and consigned to certain inspired volumes now lost; and that this primal Holy Writ received additions in the days of his descendants Shis (Seth) and Idris (Enoch?), the founder of the Sabian (not "Sabaean") faith. Here, therefore, Al-Islam at once avoided the deplorable assumption of the Hebrews and the Christians,—an error which has been so injurious ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton

... 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 ...
— Something Else Again • Franklin P. Adams

... the sea when Cytherea, Shining in primal beauty, paled the day, The wondering waters hushed, They yearned in sighs That shook the world—tumultuously heaved To a great throne of azure laced with light And canopied in foam to grace their queen. ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson

... alone in the absolutely primal sense of the word, when the individual ceases to act even to himself. The instinct he had denied was dominating him, and he was yielding with a sense ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston

... parents, but, in the general disposition to have a garden, can we not recognize a redeeming ancestral trait? I would like to contribute my little share toward increasing this tendency, believing that as humanity goes back to its first occupation it may also acquire some of the primal gardener's characteristics before he listened to temptation and ceased to be even a gentleman. When he brutally blamed the woman, it was time he was turned out of Eden. All the best things of the garden ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe

... now, that in all my endeavour I had taken on something desolate, something machine-like. No spirit, no fire, no life! Heaven knows whether I had any faith left! And all that has come back to me to-day—with such strange fullness, such primal energy, such joy ... Pshaw, what's the ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann

... spiral is a primal law, simple yet complex, which we who understand life's manifold ascensions grow to symbolize in ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various

... 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 his disciples, in ...
— Ancient Nahuatl Poetry - Brinton's Library of Aboriginal American Literature Number VII. • Daniel G. Brinton

... joy of life, if you are born in a land of the sun, and in a land of cold you dance for the joy which springs from warmth. It is a primal expression of feeling, and the Scottish Highlanders have always had beautiful dances, and danced them well; dances with the music of sex in them, though they might not admit it, or did not know it. Religion and dancing have often been ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne

... middle tints than in the lights: the main difference was, we believe, between the careful preparation of the gradations of drawing in the one, and the daring assumption of massy light in the other. There are theorists who would assert that their system was the same—but they forget the primal work, with the point underneath, and all that it implied of transparency above. Van Eyck secured his drawing in dark, then threw a pale transparent middle tint over the whole, and recovered his highest lights; ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... blind, homeless, miserable, following hearsays; it glares-in upon him. Really his utterances, are they not a kind of 'revelation;'—what we must call such for want of some other name? It is from the heart of the world that he comes; he is portion of the primal reality of things. God has made many revelations: but this man too, has not God made him, the latest and newest of all? The 'inspiration of the Almighty giveth him understanding:' we must listen ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle

... us in that Essay on Shelley which Mr. Wyndham pronounces the most important contribution to English letters during the last twenty years—"with many the religion of beauty must always be a passion and a power, and it is only evil when divorced from the worship of the Primal Beauty." In this confession we are brought back to the point where we began. The gods of Greece were ideals of earthly beauty, and by them, while their worship remained spiritual, men were exalted far above paganism. And now, as we are drawing to a close, ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman

... 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 ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville

... those dances! And all those primal things are dangerous, don't you think? Unless one ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis

... as well to choir as to congregational singing. Let us suppose now that the mere primal foundation—the mechanical execution—be respectably good; that the congregation or choir have been taught to sing in tune; that all be harmonious and properly balanced; in short, that the auditory nerves be spared any very severe shock—and what then ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... of these new things made him tremble. The terrifying beauty of Skale's ideas; the realization in cold blood that all forms in the world about him were silently a-singing, and might any moment vanish and release their huge bodies into primal sounds; that the stones in the road, the peaked hills, the very earth herself might alter in shape before his eyes: on the other hand, that the viewless forces of life and death might leap into visibility and form with the calling of their ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood

... Before he dropped off to slumber, he heard crowds cheering exultantly in the streets, and the cheering moved him as it had done in the morning. He felt that the celebration of the people was really an accompaniment to his primal reason, a reason of love and ambition to conquer in love-even as in the theatre, the music accompanies the heroin his progress. He arose once during the night to study a map of the Balkan peninsula and get nailed into his mind the exact position of ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane

... one. Once in a while the magnificence of some shop window, a dark flash of jet, or a flutter of lace on a woman's dress caught her eye, but she did not see it. She had nothing in common with anything of that kind; she had to do with the primal facts of life. Coming as she was out of the country quiet, she was quite unmoved by the thundering rush of the city streets. She might have been deaf and blind for all the impression it had upon her. Her own nature had grown ...
— Jane Field - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... 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

... dancers. "For the good 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 of being. ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn

... that 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 ...
— Burnham Breaker • Homer Greene

... hymn of the primal gods was now substituted the hideous strophes and antistrophes of the grimy spirits of darkest New York. As one performer after another took up the strain, to and fro and from upper to lower tiers of cells, ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne

... aims to 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

... spirit-life, its otherness from mere nature, and the humility and penitence in which alone mere nature receive it; yet I think that our movement from one to the other is more naturally described by us in the language of growth than in the language of convulsion. The primal object of religion is to disclose to us this perdurable basis of life, and foster our growth into communion with it. And whatever its special, language and personal colour be—for all our news of God comes to us through the consciousness of individual ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill

... or a tree, never forgets itself. Cheat it of its root, and the stem remains faithful. The minutest twig, put out to nurse upon the arm of a foreign mother, feels the thrill of the great primal law in its filmiest fibre, and breathes in every expression of its life its fidelity. If you will walk with me into the garden, I will show you a mountain-ash in full bloom; but on the top of it you will see a strange little cluster of pear-blossoms. A twig from a Seckel pear-tree was, ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb

... The powers which have been employed in its culture are thus set free for the acquisition of yet other virtues, and the formation of other good habits. Herein lies the secret of progressive goodness, of an ever nearer approach to a perfect standard of character. The primal virtues are first made habits of the unceasing consciousness and of the daily life, and the moral power no longer needed for these is then employed in the cultivation of the finer traits of superior excellence,—the shaping of the delicate ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody

... mountains and lakes of the West have become settings for the reading of the "Centaur" of Maurice de Guerin. You see the reason for the titles chosen because you feel that the poetry of line and the harmonic accompaniment of color is the primal essential. They are not so dynamic as suggestive in their quality of finality. The way is left open, in other words, for you yourself to wander, if you will, and possess the requisite ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley

... by intention on the part of the Creator it is said that each of these elements was made tripartite; and this tripartite constitution of all things is apprehended by Perception as well. The red colour in burning fire comes from (primal elementary) fire, the white colour from water, the black colour from earth—in this way Scripture explains the threefold nature of burning fire. In the same way all things are composed of elements ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut

... fluttered 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

... who inherit the primal curse, and labour for our bread, Have yet, thank God, the gift of Home, though Eden's gate is barred: And through the Winter's crystal veil, Love's roses blossom red, For him who lives in a house that has a ...
— Main Street and Other Poems • Alfred Joyce Kilmer

... and the winds have fed you; The width of your world has led you Out into the larger view; Strong with a strength that is tender, Bright with a primal splendour, Homage and praise we render - Hail ...
— Poems of Optimism • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... power is not in utilizing it for consumption at close ranges, but where it is desired to transmit it for long distances. Such illustrations may be found in electric railways, and where water power can be obtained as the primal source of energy, the cost is not excessive. It is found, however, that even with the most improved forms of mechanism, in electrical construction, the internal combustion engines are ...
— Electricity for Boys • J. S. Zerbe

... beginnings, and, when they are those of literature, the sense of freshness is nothing short of inspiring. To share the same lofty outlook, to breathe the same high air with those who first sensed a whole era of creative thoughts, is the next thing to being the gods' chosen medium for those primal expressions. ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber

... TIMORENSIS—is silent on 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 addition than a provision of Nature. During December the perfume hangs ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield

... living creatures with parts sufficiently hard to form fossils. In the latter part of the Proterozoic era there are traces of one-celled marine animals (Radiolarians) with shells of flint, and of worms that wallowed in the primal mud. It is plain that as regards the most primitive creatures the rock ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson

... account for the existence of the dew. The legend relates that in the beginning the earth touched the sky, that being the golden age when all was beautiful and glad; then some dreadful tragedy occurred, the primal unity was broken up, the earth and the sky were torn asunder as we see them now, and the dewdrops of the morning are the tears that nature sheds over the sad divorce. This wild fable is a metaphor of the truth; the beginning of all evil lies in the alienation ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser

... much smaller staff of servants than the Towers, and accommodating fewer visitors. At first it had been assumed on all hands that the stay at the Cottage was but a temporary one, pending the re-erection of the Towers on a scale of baronial magnificence; but this tradition, having passed through its primal stage of being a standing excuse with the elders into that of being a standing joke with the children, had naturally lapsed as the children grew up. Indeed, the Cottage was now too large for the family; for the Earl was still unmarried, and all his sisters had contracted splendid alliances ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw

... held back before the promise of some decisive word which I was without the power to utter. For we were only half-warm, the two of us, toying with the ghosts of the dead past and childishly afraid of the future. We were Laodiceans, neither hot nor cold, without the primal hunger to reach out and possess what we too timidly desired. We were more neutral even than Ferdinand and the Lady of the Bust, for we no longer cared sufficiently to let the other know we cared, but waited and waited in that twilight where all ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer

... shapes 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 ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton

... complacent souls faring ever along the main-travelled roads of life, who need no guiding lamp and will never see the glimmer of the bale-fires. But the breaker of traditions was of those who, having once seen the light, must follow where it leads or violate a primal law of being. Some vague sense of this was stirring the dying embers for the proletary as he was climbing the hill to the street of quiet entrances; but he pushed the saving thought aside and chose to call it fanaticism. He had drawn the line and he ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde

... man and the first woman were gardeners, and there is something wrong in any descendant of theirs who does not love a garden. He is lacking in a primal instinct. But Aunt Jane was in this respect a true daughter of Eve, a faithful co-worker with the sunshine, the winds, the rain, and all other ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall

... open, they heard a heavy footstep coming up the stairs. It advanced along the passage, and Henchard entered the room, in clothes of frayed and threadbare shabbiness, the very clothes which he had used to wear in the primal days when he had sat ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy

... to time in the National Legislature, so that issues wholly external to our own body politic engross attention and stand in the way of that close devotion to domestic advancement that becomes a self-contained commonwealth whose primal maxim has been the avoidance of all foreign entanglements. All this must needs awaken, and has, indeed, aroused, the utmost concern on the part of this Government, as well during my predecessor's term as in ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents • William McKinley

... 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

... is the worship of the Letter, instead of the Spirit, in what we chiefly accept as the ordinance and teaching of Deity; and the apprehension of a healing sacredness in the act of reading the Book whose primal ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin

... we saw of the wedding at Kafr Kenna—just a vivid, mysterious flash of human figures, drawn together by the primal impulse and longing of our common nature, garbed and ordered by the social customs which make different lands and ages seem strange to each other, and moving across the narrow stage of Time into the dimness of that Arab village, where Jesus ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke

... bring 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, having ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing

... primal fount of life and peace, Who shedd'st Thy breathing quiet all around, In me command that pain and conflict cease, And turn to music ...
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs • Mary W. Tileston

... Week-End-on-Sea 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 there's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 6, 1914 • Various

... constitution, it was 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 ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord

... rich odours 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 Vague snatches of ...
— Poems • Francis Thompson

... 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, mere dots as yet across separating space, ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister

... cordiality wholly assumed. One of the primal instincts of Cowperwood's nature—for all his chicane and subtlety—was to take no rough advantage of a beaten enemy. In the hour of victory he was always courteous, bland, gentle, and even sympathetic; he was so ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser

... you at this moment to despair is the idea of perfection in your mistress, the idea that has been shattered. But when you understand that the primal idea itself was human, small and restricted, you will see that it is little more than a rung in the ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset

... said gravely, "you are not sincere when you say your primal reason for leaving would be in order to set me free. Of course you are ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson

... lengths of hours, Such miracles performed in play, Such primal naked forms of flowers, Such letting Nature have her way While Heaven ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various

... light of a globe, imperceptibly gliding through lucid demi-tints into rich reflected shades, composes the spell of Correggio, and affects us with the soft emotions of a delicious dream." Here terminates the great, the primal era. Such were the patriarchs of modern art. Here, it may be said, terminated the great discoverers. Mr Fuseli pauses here to observe, that we should consider the characteristic of each of these painters, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various

... imagined it in the days before he became the thrall of Miss Poppy Grace. He had known the feeling, but until now he had not known the woman who could inspire it. It was as if his heart had renewed its primal virginity in ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair

... expound the intricacies 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, ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)

... Dawn of History) that four of the greatest movements of conquest have been due to drought in Arabia, causing the nomads of that country to migrate into regions already inhabited. The last of these four movements was the rise of Islam. In these four cases, the primal need of food and drink was enough to set events in motion; but as this need could only be satisfied by conquest, the four secondary passions must have very soon come into play. In the conquests of modern industrialism, the ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell

... are 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 ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds

... in the Old World, people who wish to attain competence or wealth must toil hard for it. In Canada, with all its capabilities and advantages, there is no royal road to riches—no Midas touch to turn everything into gold. The primal curse still holds good, "though softened into mercy;" and those who emigrate, expecting to work less hard for 5s. a day than at home for 1s. 6d., will be miserably disappointed, for, where high wages are given, ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird

... come to an end, he invited him to Concord and cared for him like a brother. Mr. Alcott deserved this, for though he was not more a philosopher than Thoreau was a naturalist, and equally with Thoreau he was a character. The primal tenet in his creed was like the ancient mariner's, to harm neither man nor bird nor beast; and he exemplified this doctrine with incredible consistency for full fifty years. He lived a blameless life. Many laughed at him for his unpractical ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns

... Saturn. Prometheus defies the power of his enemy, and endures centuries of torture; till the hour arrives when Jove, blind to the real event, but darkly guessing that some great good to himself will flow, espouses Thetis. At the moment, the Primal Power of the world drives him from his usurped throne, and Strength, in the person of Hercules, liberates Humanity, typified in Prometheus, from the tortures generated by evil done or suffered. Asia, one of the Oceanides, is the wife of Prometheus—she was, according to other ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley

... explain the discrepancy. Prout felt that it could not be accidental, and he could think of no tenable explanation, unless it be that the atoms of the various alleged elements are made up of different fixed numbers of hydrogen atoms. Could it be that the one true element—the one primal matter—is hydrogen, and that all other forms of matter are but compounds ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... little essay, it will be sufficient to consider the Kami as the spirits of the dead,—without making any attempt to distinguish such Kami from those primal deities believed to have created the land. With this general interpretation of the term Kami, we return, then, to the great Shinto idea that all the dead still dwell in the world and rule it; influencing not only ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn

... unconsciously. Still they were in love with each other, the passion was there. But the passion was consumed in a battle. And the deep, fierce unnamed battle went on. Everything glowed intensely about them, the world had put off its clothes and was awful, with new, primal nakedness. ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

... had been the glimpse, that his conscious feeling was but of charm, inspired by the primal strength of this wild and unconquerable thing before him. The restive swaying of the body brought to the old gentleman's mind an incident he once had seen at a circus, when an elephant, fretted by its ankle chain, rocked from foot to foot in sullen disquiet. ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris

... not a 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 ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer

... breast I fall, A spiritual thing Once more, and hear with ear insensual The voice of primal Earth Breathed gently as on Eden faint airs forth; And so contented to thy bosom cling, Though all those loves are gone nor faithful echoes ring, Nor fond Adieu, Adieu My ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman

... the flashing of clear waters more delightful than the gleam of diamonds; the autumn's rainbow tints more inspiring than the dull red heart of the ruby. To have such a home in Texas were like a sojourn in that pleasant paradise where our primal parents first tasted terrestrial delights. No Alps or Apennines burst from Texas' broad bosom and rear their cold, dead peaks mile above mile into heaven's mighty vault; no Vesuvius belches his lurid, ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... in which he had a perverse question of changing his allegiance. This passed into another moment, almost as perilous, of confusion through a primal instinct of the man's by which he yields a double or a divided allegiance and simultaneously worships at two shrines; in still another breath he was aware that this ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells

... 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 frontier ...
— Cowboy Songs - and Other Frontier Ballads • Various

... worth speaking. We know what language means too well here in Boston to play tricks with it. We never make a new word till we have made a new thing or a new thought, Sir! When we shaped the new mould of this continent, we had to make a few. When, by God's permission, we abrogated the primal curse of maternity, we had to make a word or two. The cutwater of this great Leviathan clipper, the OCCIDENTAL,—this thirty-masted wind-and-steam wave-crusher,—must throw a little spray over the human vocabulary as it splits the waters of ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various

... Phoebe's impatience increased. Her position did not, however, depend for comfort upon the return of sunshine, for she stood out of the weather, where sundry giant rocks to the number of five arose in a fantastic pile. Nature's primal architects were responsible for the Pixies' Parlour, and upon the awful morning of Dartmoor's creation these enormous masses had first been hurled to their present position—outposts of the eternal granite, though themselves widely removed from the central waste of the Moor. This particular ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts

... simple and natural people readily understand Jesus is that in the kind of life they live the primal emotions are supreme. The very narrowness of their social outlook intensifies those emotions. They have little to distract them; they are not bewildered by endless disquisitions on conduct, and religion itself is for ...
— The Empire of Love • W. J. Dawson

... same time in the animal world desire is usually 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 natural and inevitable feeling. What is absent is the restraint which makes men refrain ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky

... middle, and then goes slap over Wetterhorn 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 ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc

... man, less recent! Fragmentary fossil! Primal pioneer of pliocene formation, Hid in lowest drifts below the ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte

... 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 features of ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly

... 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.)

... time there arose desire, Which was the primal germ of mind, within it. And sages, searching in their heart, discovered In Nothing ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta

... its relation to me? The sensation goes over into thought, the thought into action. Thus the impression of the object is built into the little universe of his mind. The object and the action it implies are closely associated. As more objects are apprehended, more complex relations arise, but the primal condition remains—What can I do with it? Sensation, thought, action—this is the natural sequence of each completed mental process. As volition passes over into action, so does science into art, knowledge into ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan

... about the revelation of the fact on both sides, and the arrangements it would be desirable to make beforehand. I suppose we should all have felt as Deronda did, without sinking into snobbishness or the notion that the primal duties of life demand a morning and an evening suit, that it was an admissible desire to free Mirah's first meeting with her brother from all jarring outward conditions. His own sense of deliverance from the dreaded relationship of the other ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot

... not 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 ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister

... existence, intelligence, and goodness of God from the evidences of design in creation,—from that nice adaptation of means to ends which shows an infinite knowledge and infinite benevolence at work; but no one of the instances in which they found their argument, from the watch, which affords the primal illustration, to the human body, which furnishes the most complex confirmations, is a more astonishing or exquisite proof of pre-arrangement than is the adaptedness of gold and silver to the purposes of currency. Your standard ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various

... It was filled with many things, of which Kazan and Gray Wolf were not the most important. The monsters he had seen on the moonlit plot of sand had roused in him a new kind of caution, and the one greatest instinct of beasts—the primal understanding that it is the strong that prey upon the weak—was wakening swiftly in him. As yet he quite naturally measured brute force and the menace of things by size alone. Thus the bear was more terrible than Kazan, and ...
— Baree, Son of Kazan • James Oliver Curwood



Words linked to "Primal" :   of import, early, primeval, important



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