The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the power of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which ourdull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive formsöthis knowledge, this feeling, isatthe centerof true religiousness.In thissense, and in this sense only, I belong to the rank of devoutly religious men.

-Einstein, Albert
Quoted in Philipp Frank Einstein: HisLife and Times (1947), ch.12, section 5.

Les temps primitifs sont lyriques, les temps antiques sont e¤  piques, les temps modernes sont dramatiques. The primitive era was lyrical, the classical era was epic and the modern era is dramatic.

-Hugo,Victor Marie
  Cromwell, pre¤  face.

A poem is at once the most primitive and most sophisticateduse of language, but myemphasisis onthe former.

-Kunitz, StanleyJasspon
  Next-to-Last  Things,'The Wisdom of the Body'.

The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machineryand primitive music and primitive medicine.

-Leacock, Stephen Butler
  Behind the Beyond,'Homer and Humbug'.

Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.

-Mailer, Norman Kingsley
  In Dissent, Summer.

The most primitive men are the most credulous.

-Pope, Alexander
  Miscellanies,'Thoughts onVarious Subjects', vol.2.

Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended. It combines the best features of that primitive form of cricket known asTip-and-Run with those of lawn tennis, Puss-in-the-corner and Handel's Messiah.

-Shaw, George Bernard
Quoted in ColinJarmanThe Guinness Dictionary of Sports Quotations (1990).

Radical chic invariably favors radicals who seem primitive, exotic and romantic.

-Wolfe,Tom (Thomas Kennerley)
  Radical Chic.