Loren Eiseley Quotes
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.
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.
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.
The great artist, whether he be musician, painter, or poet, is known for this absolute unexpectedness.
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.
Each one of us is a statistical impossibility around which hover a million other lives that were never destined to be born.
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.
It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man.
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.
Man is always marveling at what he has blown apart, never at what the universe has put together, and this is his limitation.
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.
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?
Each and all, we are riding into the dark. Even living, we cannot remember half the events of our own days.
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.
In the desert, an old monk had once advised a traveler, the voices of God and the Devil are scarcely distinguishable.
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?
One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human.
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.
It has been asserted that we are destined to know the dark beyond the stars before we comprehend the nature of our own journey.
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.
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.
God knows how many things a man misses by becoming smug and assuming that matters will take their own course.
Life, unlike the inanimate, will take the long way round to circumvent barrenness. A kind of desperate will resides even in a root.
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.
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.
It was the failures who had always won, but by the time they won they had come to be called successes.
The freedom to create is somehow linked with facility of access to those obscure regions below the conscious mind.
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.
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.
Many of us who walk to and fro upon our usual tasks are prisoners drawing mental maps of escape.
Each man deciphers from the ancient alphabets of nature only those secrets that his own deeps possess the power to endow with meaning.
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.
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.
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.
The iron did not remember the blood it had once moved within, the phosphorous had forgot the savage brain.
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.
