Quotes About Atavism

The truth was that nobody ever arrived without invitation, and all that tidying and wiping was performed out of what struck me as deep social atavism

catching a glimpse of his rather hippyish form in a mirror, he wonders at this atavism of apparel, is it an inversion of foetal ontogeny, in which the phenotype passes through previous fashion stages? Soon there will be gaiters and gloves...I will probably die, he thinks, clad in animal skins.

Their [philosophers] thinking is, in fact, far less a discovery than a re-recognizing, a remembering, a return and a home-coming to a far-off, ancient common-household of the soul, out of which those ideas formerly grew: philosophizing is so far a kind of atavism of the highest order.

What an age experiences as evil is usually an untimely reverberation echoing what was previously experienced as good—the atavism of an older ideal.

Fear was not a familiar sensation, and this fear-stranger-fear of the unknown-even less so. Among the legacies of atavism corrected by rightminding was the overactive fear response of the human amygdala to anything foreign or strange.

I am a black American, I say, and thus announce my atavistic connection to all others who live as black Americans, to all who ever lived as black Americans. Religion, caste, class, gender and race can all be atavisms, and they are inherently anti-democratic because they exclude all outside the atavism.

I always paint those vast sandy expanses that go as far as the eye can see. I don't know why; I have never been in North Africa. I suppose it's an atavism of the Arab blood.

Chez les uns, c'est un retour aux âge consommés, aux civilisations disparues, aux temps morts ; Chez les autres, c'est un élancement vers le fantastique et vers le rêve, c'est une vision plus ou moins intense d'un temps à éclore dont l'image reproduit, sans qu'il le sache, par un effet d'atavisme, celle des époques révolues.

Have you ever seen a woman canter over the hills in the twilight? Scandal sheets are no match for atavism.

What an age experiences as evil is usually an untimely reverberation echoing what was previously experienced as good--the atavismof an older ideal.

I suppose my liking for Italy is partly atavism, my family are of the old Roman stock. They came from the Alps north of Venice.