Primitive Instinct Quotes

Poetic power is great, strong as a primitive instinct; it has its own unyielding rhythms in itself and breaks out as out of mountains.

A beast does not know that he is a beast, and the nearer a man gets to being a beast, the less he knows it.

We didn't ever want 'Tarzan' to feel like he was just a man. We didn't want him to stand up straight or wave good-bye. We wanted to make sure he always had that piece of gorilla in him, that he always had an animal attitude about him.

War. What was it about the prospect of some bloody enterprises that reduced men to the level of animals?

The unselective knowledge drive resembles the indiscriminate sexual drive--signs of vulgarity!

It may be a mistake, that man, in a state of nature, is more disposed to cruelty than courtesy.

All Creatures know that some must die That all the rest may take and eat; Sooner or later, all transform Their blood to wine, their flesh to meat. But Man alone seeks Vengefulness, And writes his abstract Laws on stone; For this false Justice he has made, He tortures limb and crushes bone. Is this the image of a god? My tooth for yours, your eye for mine? Oh, if Revenge did move the stars Instead of Love, they would not shine.

Is man a savage at heart, skinned o'er with fragile Manners? Or is savagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel's arse?

Vengeful as nature herself, she loves her children only in order to devour them better and if she herself rips her own veils of self-deceit, Mother perceives in herself untold abysses of cruelty as subtle as it is refined.

I can't accept "our nervous age," since mankind has been nervous during every age. Whoever fears nervousness should turn into a sturgeon or smelt; if a sturgeon makes a stupid mistake, it can only be one: to end up on a hook, and then in a pan in a pastry shell.

The human failing I would most like to correct is aggression. It may have had survival advantage in caveman days, to get more food, territory or a partner with whom to reproduce, but now it threatens to destroy us all.

The savage in man is never quite eradicated.

As I came home through the woods with my string of fish, trailing my pole, it being now quite dark, I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw; not that I was hungry then, except for that wildness which he represented.

I sport a cave-man mentality.

I have instincts.

Self-preservation, nature's first great law, all the creatures, except man, doth awe.

The difficulty with becoming a patient is that as soon as you get horizontal, part of your being yearns, not for a doctor, but for a medicine man.

When I get through tearing a lobster apart, or one of those tender West Coast octopuses, I feel like I had a drink from the fountain of youth.

Our aggression is a deep instinct which survives in all kinds of manifestations in modern man.

One thing I can't prove, but I firmly believe is that two men were put on this earth - one threw a punch and a third guy came over and watched. And that happened before anybody ever threw or kicked a ball.

The smell of the sea swept over the wall and in through the empty window-hole, wide and wild with a million intoxicating secrets. I don't trust that smell. It hooks us somewhere deeper than reason or civilization, in the fragments of our cells that rocked in oceans before we had minds, and it pulls till we follow mindlessly as rutting animals....It lures us to leap off high cliffs, fling ourselves on towering waves, leaves behind everyone we love and face into thousands of miles of open water for the sake of what might be on the far shore.

Mankind, I hazard, wherever found, Civilized or Savage, cannot keep to any purpose for much length of time, except the purpose of destroying himself.

So, let us push on now, and remember ourselves back to the wild soul. Let us sing her flesh back onto our bones.

That hunger of the flesh, that longing for ease, that terror of incarceration, that insistence on tribal honour being obeyed: all of that exists, and it exists everywhere.

Do I really believe that my work is crucial to the planet's survival? Of course not. But it's as important to me as catching that mouse is to the hawk circling outside my window. He's hungry. He needs a kill. So do I.