#primitive

Music is essentially built upon primitive memory structures. ↗

— Morton Feldman

#essentially #memory #music #primitive #structures

My musical knowledge is so bad it's embarrassing. When composers discuss music with someone as primitive as myself, they have to talk about it in terms of senses and emotion, rather than keys and tempo. ↗

— Jane Campion

#bad #composers #discuss #embarrassing #emotion

Good music is very close to primitive language. ↗

— Denis Diderot

#good #good music #language #music #primitive

Arles is certainly one of the most interesting towns I have ever seen, whether viewed as a place remarkable for the objects of antiquity it contains, or for the primitive manners of its inhabitants and its picturesque appearance. ↗

— Marguerite Gardiner

#appearance #certainly #contains #ever #i

I am the primitive of the method I have invented. ↗

— Paul Cezanne

#i #i am #invented #method #primitive

You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help? ↗

— Dan Barker

#primitive-men #religion #superstition #food

Every neurosis is a primitive form of legal proceeding in which the accused carries on the prosecution, imposes judgment and executes the sentence: all to the end that someone else should not perform the same process. ↗

— Lionel Trilling

#carries #else #end #every #form

Can you be sure that others have not come before you and destroyed the pristine state of the native myth? Can you be sure that the natives are not humoring you or pulling your leg? Bronislaw Malinowski thought he had discovered a people in the Trobriant Islands who had not worked out the connection between sexual intercourse and childbirth. When asked how children were conceived, they supplied him with an elaborate mythic structure prominently featuring celestial intervention. Amazed, Malinowski objected that was not how it was done at all, and supplied them instead with the version so popular in the West today – including a nine-month gestation period. “Impossible,” replied the Melanesians. “Do you not see that woman over there with her six-month-old child? Her husband has been on an extended voyage to another island for two years.” Is it more likely that the Melanesians were ignorant of the begetting of children or that they were gently chiding Malinowski? If some peculiar-looking stranger came into my town and asked ME where babies came from, I’d certainly be tempted to tell him about storks and cabbages. Prescientific people are people. Individually they are as clever as we are. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#cleverness #myths #people #primitive #humor

France can never accept that it is no longer a dominating power in the world of culture. This is true both of the French right and the French left. They keep thinking that Americans are primitive cowboys or farmers who do not understand anything. ↗

— Adam Michnik

#anything #both #cowboys #culture #dominating

A primitive artist is an amateur whose work sells. ↗

— Grandma Moses

#artist #primitive #sells #whose #work