Top 90 Loren Eiseley Quotes
#1. Each one of us is a statistical impossibility around which hover a million other lives that were never destined to be born.
Loren Eiseley
#2. But there is every reason to think that the bulging cortex which would later measure stars and ice ages was still a dim, impoverished region in a skull box whose capacity was no greater than that of great apes.
Loren Eiseley
#3. One could not pluck a flower without troubling a star.
Loren Eiseley
#4. Already he [humanity] is physically antique in this robot world he has created. All that sustains him is that small globe of grey matter through which spin his ever-changing conceptions of the universe.
Loren Eiseley
#5. If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.
Loren Eiseley
#6. I was a shadow among shadows brooding over the fate of other shadows that I alone strove to summon up out of the all-pervading dusk.
Loren Eiseley
#7. God knows how many things a man misses by becoming smug and assuming that matters will take their own course.
Loren Eiseley
#8. It has been said that great art is the night thought of man. It may emerge without warning from the soundless depths of the unconscious, just as supernovas may blaze up suddenly in the farther reaches of void space.
Loren Eiseley
#9. It is conceivable that in principle man's motor through-ways resemble the slime trails along which are drawn the gathering mucors that erect the spore palaces, that man's cities are only the ephemeral moment of his spawning
that he must descend upon the orchard of far worlds or die.
Loren Eiseley
#10. Perhaps he knew, there in the grass by the waters, that he had before him an immense journey.
Loren Eiseley
#11. Just as instinct may fail an animal under some shift of environmental conditions, so man's cultural beliefs may prove inadequate to meet a new situation, or, on an individual level, the confused mind may substitute, by some terrible alchemy, cruelty for love. The
Loren Eiseley
#12. Subconsciously the genius is feared as an image breaker; frequently he does not accept the opinions of the mass, or man's opinion of himself.
Loren Eiseley
#13. The great artist, whether he be musician, painter, or poet, is known for this absolute unexpectedness.
Loren Eiseley
#14. We have joined the caravan, you might say, at a certain point; we will travel as far as we can, but we cannot in a lifetime see all that we would like to see or learn all that we hunger to know.
Loren Eiseley
#15. Man is dragged hither and thither, at one moment by the blind instincts of the forest, at the next by the strange intuitions of a higher self whose rationale he doubts and does not understand.
Loren Eiseley
#16. The freedom to create is somehow linked with facility of access to those obscure regions below the conscious mind.
Loren Eiseley
#17. Life, unlike the inanimate, will take the long way round to circumvent barrenness. A kind of desperate will resides even in a root.
Loren Eiseley
#18. For the first time in four billion years a living creature had contemplated himself and heard with a sudden, unaccountable loneliness, the whisper of the wind in the night reeds.
Loren Eiseley
#20. I am sure now that life is not what it is purported to be and that nature, in the canny words of the Scotch theologue, 'is not as natural as it looks.
Loren Eiseley
#21. On the other hand the machine does not bleed, ache, hang for hours in the empty sky in a torment of hope to learn the fate of another machine, nor does it cry out with joy nor dance in the air with the fierce passion of a bird.
Loren Eiseley
#22. One (practitioner of science) is the educated man who still has a controlled sense of wonder before the universal mystery, whether it hides in a snail's eye or within the light that impinges on that delicate organ.
Loren Eiseley
#24. After chiding the theologian for his reliance on myth and miracle, science found itself in the unenviable position of having to create mythology of its own: namely, the assumption that what, after long effort, could not be proved to take place today had, in truth, taken place in the primeval past.
Loren Eiseley
#25. The teacher must ever walk warily between the necessity of inducing those conformities which in every generation reaffirm our rebellious humanity, and of allowing for the free play of the creative spirit.
Loren Eiseley
#26. If one could run the story of that first human group like a speeded-up motion picture through a million years of time, one might see the stone in the hand change to the flint ax and the torch.
Loren Eiseley
#27. I no longer cared about survival ... I merely loved.
Loren Eiseley
#28. [On common water.] Its substance reaches everywhere; it touches the past and prepares the future; it moves under the poles and wanders thinly in the heights of air. It can assume forms of exquisite perfection in a snowflake, or strip the living to a single shining bone cast up by the sea.
Loren Eiseley
#29. You think that way as you begin to get grayer and you see pretty plainly that the game is not going to end as you planned.
Loren Eiseley
#30. Once in a lifetime, perhaps, one escapes the actual confines of the flesh. Once in a lifetime, if one is lucky, one so merges with sunlight and air and running water that whole eons, the eons that mountains and deserts know, might pass in a single afternoon without discomfort.
Loren Eiseley
#31. In the desert, an old monk had once advised a traveler, the voices of God and the Devil are scarcely distinguishable.
Loren Eiseley
#32. It is a funny thing what the brain will do with memories and how it will treasure them and finally bring them into odd juxtapositions with other things, as though it wanted to make a design, or get some meaning out of them, whether you want it or not, or even see it.
Loren Eiseley
#33. The best way to be resurrected is to be forgotten.
Loren Eiseley
#34. At the core of the universe, the face of God wears a smile
Loren Eiseley
#35. We are one of many appearances of the thing called Life; we are not its perfect image, for it has no perfect image except Life, and life is multitudinous and emergent in the stream of time.
Loren Eiseley
#36. Primitives of our own species, even today are historically shallow in their knowledge of the past. Only the poet who writes speaks his message across the millennia to other hearts.
Loren Eiseley
#37. It was the world of the abyss, supposedly as lifeless as the earth's first midnight.
Loren Eiseley
#38. Man inhabits a realm half in and half out of nature, his mind reaching forever beyond the tool, the uniformity, the law, into some realm which is that of the mind alone.
Loren Eiseley
#39. Lights come and go in the night sky. Men, troubled at last by the things they build, may toss in their sleep and dream bad dreams, or lie awake while the meteors whisper greenly overhead. But nowhere in all space or on a thousand worlds will there be men to share our loneliness.
Loren Eiseley
#40. To have dragons one must have change; that is the first principle of dragon lore.
Loren Eiseley
#41. Without the gift of flowers and the infinite diversity of their fruits, man and bird, if they had continued to exist at all, would be today unrecognizable.
Loren Eiseley
#42. Each and all, we are riding into the dark. Even living, we cannot remember half the events of our own days.
Loren Eiseley
#43. I am what I am and cannot be otherwise because of the shadows.
Loren Eiseley
#44. The journey is difficult, immense. We will travel as far as we can, but we cannot in one lifetime see all that we would like to see or to learn all that we hunger to know.
Loren Eiseley
#45. Every man contains within himself a ghost continent.
Loren Eiseley
#46. I am not nearly so interested in what monkey man was derived from as I am in what kind of monkey he is to become.
Loren Eiseley
#47. Every time we walk along a beach some ancient urge disturbs us so that we find ourselves shedding shoes and garments or scavenging among seaweed and whitened timbers like the homesick refugees of a long war.
Loren Eiseley
#48. It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man.
Loren Eiseley
#49. There is nothing more alone in the universe than man. He is alone because he has the intellectual capacity to know that he is separated by a vast gulf of social memory and experiment from the lives of his animal associates.
Loren Eiseley
#50. Over the whole earth- this infinitely small globe that possesses all we know of sunshine and bird song- an unfamiliar blight is creeping: man- man, who has become at last a planetary disease and who would, if his technology yet permitted, pass this infection to another star.
Loren Eiseley
#51. What if I am, in some way, only a sophisticated fire that has acquired an ability to regulate its rate of combustion and to hoard its fuel in order to see and walk?
Loren Eiseley
#52. When the human mind exists in the light of reason and no more than reason, we may say with absolute certainty that Man and all that made him will be in that instant gone.
Loren Eiseley
#53. The creature called man has a strange history. He is not of one piece, nor was he born of a single moment in time. His elementary substance is stardust almost as old as the universe.
Loren Eiseley
#54. Each man deciphers from the ancient alphabets of nature only those secrets that his own deeps possess the power to endow with meaning.
Loren Eiseley
#55. When man becomes greater than nature, nature, which gave us birth, will respond.
Loren Eiseley
#56. Tomorrow lurks in us, the latency to be all that was not achieved before.
Loren Eiseley
#57. We cannot pluck a flower witout disturbing a star.
Loren Eiseley
#58. We think we learn from teachers, and we sometimes do. But the teachers are not always to be found in school or in great laboratories. Sometimes what we learn depends upon our own powers of insight.
Loren Eiseley
#59. The venture into space is meaningless unless it coincides with a certain interior expansion, an ever-growing universe within, to correspond with the far flight of the galaxies our telescopes follow from without.
Loren Eiseley
#60. Man no longer dreams over a book in which a soft voice, a constant companion, observes, exhorts, or sighs with him through the pangs of youth and age. Today he is more likely to sit before a screen and dream the mass dream which comes from outside.
Loren Eiseley
#61. Like the herd animals we are, we sniff warily at the strange one among us.
Loren Eiseley
#62. It is a commonplace of all religious thought, even the most primitive, that the man seeking visions and insight must go apart from his fellows and love for a time in the wilderness.
Loren Eiseley
#63. Choices, more choices than we like afterward to believe, are made far backward in the innocence of childhood.
Loren Eiseley
#64. It was the failures who had always won, but by the time they won they had come to be called successes.
Loren Eiseley
#65. The truth is, however, that there is nothing very "normal" about nature. Once upon a time there were no flowers at all.
Loren Eiseley
#66. The creative element in the mind of man ... emerges in as mysterious a fashion as those elementary particles which leap into momentary existence in great cyclotrons, only to vanish again like infinitesimal ghosts.
Loren Eiseley
#67. Many of us who walk to and fro upon our usual tasks are prisoners drawing mental maps of escape.
Loren Eiseley
#68. Some men are daylight readers, who peruse the ambiguous wording of clouds or the individual letter shapes of wandering birds. Some, like myself, are librarians of the night, whose ephemeral documents consist of root-inscribed bones or whatever rustles in the thickets upon solitary walks.
Loren Eiseley
#69. Some degree of withdrawal serves to nurture man's creative powers. The artist and the scientist bring out of the dark void, like the mysterious universe itself, the unique, the strange, the unexpected. Numerous observers have testified upon the loneliness of the process.
Loren Eiseley
#70. It has been said repeatedly that one can never, try as he will, get around to the front of the universe. Man is destined to see only its far side, to realize nature only in retreat.
Loren Eiseley
#71. If it should turn out that we have mishandled our own lives as several civilizations before us have done, it seems a pity that we should involve the violet and the tree frog in our departure.
Loren Eiseley
#72. As for men, those myriad little detached ponds with their own swarming corpuscular life, what were they but a way that water has of going about beyond the reach of rivers?
Loren Eiseley
#73. It has been asserted that we are destined to know the dark beyond the stars before we comprehend the nature of our own journey.
Loren Eiseley
#74. Fire, as we have learned to our cost, has an insatiable hunger to be fed. It is a nonliving force that can even locomote itself.
Loren Eiseley
#75. If you cannot bear the silence and the darkness, do not go there; if you dislike black night and yawning chasms, never make them your profession.
Loren Eiseley
#76. Mind is locked in matter like the spirit Ariel in a cloven pine. Like Ariel, men struggle to escape the drag of the matter they inhabit, yet it is the spirit that they fear.
Loren Eiseley
#77. One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human.
Loren Eiseley
#78. I am older now, and sleep less, and have seen most of what there is to see and am not very much impressed any more, I suppose, by anything.
Loren Eiseley
#79. Certainly science has moved forward. But when science progresses, it often opens vaster mysteries to our gaze. Moreover, science frequently discovers that it must abandon or modify what it once believed. Sometimes it ends by accepting what it has previously scorned.
Loren Eiseley
#80. But I do love the world, I whispered to the empty room. I love its small ones, the things beaten in the strangling surf the singing bird which falls and is not seen again, the lost ones, the failures of the world.
Loren Eiseley
#81. From the solitude of the wood, (Man) has passed to the more dreadful solitude of the heart.
Loren Eiseley
#82. Man is always marveling at what he has blown apart, never at what the universe has put together, and this is his limitation.
Loren Eiseley
#84. Modern man lives increasingly in the future and neglects the present.
Loren Eiseley
#85. The future is neither ahead nor behind, on one side or another. Nor is it dark or light. It is contained within ourselves; its evil and good are perpetually within us.
Loren Eiseley
#86. I love forms beyond my own, and regret the borders between us
Loren Eiseley
#87. The secret, if one may paraphrase a savage vocabulary, lies in the egg of night.
Loren Eiseley
#88. Our heads, the little globes which hold the midnight sky and the shining, invisible universes of thought, have been taken about as much for granted as the growth of a yellow pumpkin in the fall.
Loren Eiseley
#89. The iron did not remember the blood it had once moved within, the phosphorous had forgot the savage brain.
Loren Eiseley
#90. This is the most enormous extension of vision of which life is capable: the projection of itself into other lives. This is the lonely, magnificent power of humanity. It is ... the supreme epitome of the reaching out.
Loren Eiseley
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