Robert Ardrey Quotes

7 Quotes Sorted by Search Results (Descending)

About Robert Ardrey

Robert Ardrey (b. 16 October 1908 in Chicago, Illinois; d. 14 January 1980 in Kalk Bay, South Africa) was a writer, anthropologist, playwright and screenwriter.

Born: October 16th, 1908

Died: 1980

Categories: Anthropologists, Playwrights, People from Illinois, Screenwriters

Quotes: 7 sourced quotes total

Meta dataAverageRange
Words (count)6922 - 122
Search Results1410 - 40
There is nothing so moving - not even acts of love or hate - as the discovery that one is not alone.
Robert Ardrey
The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Investigation into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations (1966)
• Source: Wikiquote: "Robert Ardrey" (Quotes)
A skepticism concerning what one beholds - whether in the arts, in the sciences, or in the deeply etched channels of fashionable response - contains a force essential to the survival of civilized man.
The philosophy of the impossible has been the dominant motive in human affairs for the past two centuries. We have pursued the mastery of nature as if we ourselves were not a portion of that nature. We have boasted of our command over our physical environment while we ourselves have done our urgent best to destroy it.
Robert Ardrey
The Social Contract: A Personal Investigation into the Animal Origins of Order and Disorder (1970)
• Source: Wikiquote: "Robert Ardrey" (Quotes)
Intelligence is no human sideshow but an evolutionary main event. The power to foresee, to call upon the past in terms of the future, to evaluate, to imagine solutions, is a power flowing from old time springs. The human mind may be denied the policeman's privilege of arresting this instinct or that. It may sit as no more than a moderator in the eternal instinctual debate. But it is a moderator with unlimited investigative powers.
Art is an adventure. When it ceases to be an adventure, it ceases to be art. Not all of us pursue the inaccessible landscapes of the twelve-tone scale, just as not all of us strive for inaccessible mountain-tops, or glory in storms at sea. But the human incidence is there. Could it be that these two impractical pursuits - of beauty and of adventure’s embrace - are simply two differing profiles of the same uniquely human reality?
Robert Ardrey
The Hunting Hypothesis: A Personal Conclusion Concerning the Evolutionary Nature of Man (1976)
• Source: Wikiquote: "Robert Ardrey" (Quotes)
We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted to battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.
I find myself frequently maintaining to any young passer-by upon whose attention I can force myself that a genuinely creative career must like a milking stool stand on three legs. There must be accident, there must be sweat, there must be dissatisfaction. That one must work hard is too obvious for comment here. That one must be endowed with native dissatisfaction is very nearly as obvious, for it is the engine that drives you: dissatisfaction with the world and the arts as you find them, dissatisfaction with your own best efforts to capture the uncapturable. What is not so obvious is the support which one must gain from accident, from those dispositions of wind and stars over which one has no control.

End Robert Ardrey Quotes