Loren Eiseley Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“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 -
“Each one of us is a statistical impossibility around which hover a million other lives that were never destined to be born.”
-- Loren Eiseley -
“If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.”
-- Loren Eiseley -
“It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man.”
-- Loren Eiseley -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“We are rag dolls made out of many ages and skins, changelings who have slept in wood nests, and hissed in the uncouth guise of waddling amphibians. We have played such roles for infinitely longer ages than we have been human. Our identity is a dream. We are process, not reality.”
-- Loren Eiseley -
“One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human.”
-- Loren Eiseley -
“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 -
“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 -
“The need is not really for more brains, the need is now for a gentler, a more tolerant people than those who won for us against the ice, the tiger and the bear. The hand that hefted the ax, out of some old blind allegiance to the past fondles the machine gun as lovingly. It is a habit man will have to break to survive, but the roots go very deep.”
-- Loren Eiseley -
“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 -
“Perhaps a creature of so much ingenuity and deep memory is almost bound to grow alienated from his world, his fellows, and the objects around him. He suffers from a nostalgia for which there is no remedy upon earth except as it is to be found in the enlightenment of the spirit--some ability to have a perceptive rather than an exploitive relationship with his fellow creatures.”
-- Loren Eiseley -
“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 -
“I once saw, on a flower pot in my own living room, the efforts of a field mouse to build a remembered field. I have lived to see this episode repeated in a thousand guises, and since I have spent a large portion of my life in the shade of a nonexistent tree I think I am entitled to speak for the field mouse.”
-- Loren Eiseley -
“The secret, if one may paraphrase a savage vocabulary, lies in the egg of night.”
-- Loren Eiseley -
“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 -
“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 -
“Out of the choked Devonian waters emerged sight and sound and the music that rolls invisible through the composer's brain. They are there still in the ooze along the tideline, though no one notices. The world is fixed, we say: fish in the sea, birds in the air. But in the mangrove swamps by the Niger, fish climb trees and ogle uneasy naturalists who try unsuccessfully to chase them back to the water. There are things still coming ashore.”
-- Loren Eiseley -
“I no longer cared about survival...I merely loved.”
-- Loren Eiseley -
“Choices, more choices than we like afterward to believe, are made far backward in the innocence of childhood.”
-- Loren Eiseley -
“The iron did not remember the blood it had once moved within, the phosphorous had forgot the savage brain.”
-- Loren Eiseley -
“In the end, science as we know it has two basic types of practitioners. One 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. The second kind of observer is the extreme reductionist who is so busy stripping things apart that the tremendous mystery has been reduced to a trifle, to intangibles not worth troubling one's head about.”
-- Loren Eiseley -
“Nothing grows among its pinnacles; there is no shade except under great toadstools of sandstone whose bases have been eaten to the shape of wine glasses by the wind. Everything is flaking, cracking, disintegrating, wearing away in the long, inperceptible weather of time. The ash of ancient volcanic outbursts still sterilizes its soil, and its colors in that waste are the colors that flame in the lonely sunsets on dead planets.”
-- Loren Eiseley -
“Great minds have always seen it. That is why man has survived his journey this long. When we fail to wish any longer to be otherwise than what we are, we will have ceased to evolve. Evolution has to be lived forward. I say this as one who has stood above the bones of much that has vanished, and at midnight has examined his own face.”
-- Loren Eiseley -
“There is nothing very 'normal' about nature.”
-- Loren Eiseley -
“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 -
“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. If you fear the sound of water hurrying through crevices toward unknown and mysterious destinations, do not consider it. Seek out the sunshine. It is a simple prescription. Avoid the darkness.”
-- Loren Eiseley -
“The great artist, whether he be musician, painter, or poet, is known for this absolute unexpectedness.”
-- Loren Eiseley
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