Loren Eiseley

“Taking a final pleasure in what the wind can neither proclaim nor destroy, I am a student of nightfall, I claim no…

— Loren Eiseley

We are one of many appearances of the thing called Life; we are not its perfect image, for it has no perfect…

— Loren Eiseley

Perhaps a creature of so much ingenuity and deep memory is almost bound to grow alienated from his world, his fellows, and…

— Loren Eiseley

“The best way to be resurrected is to be forgotten.”

— Loren Eiseley

To have dragons one must have change; that is the first principle of dragon lore.

— 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

Every time we walk along a beach some ancient urge disturbs us so that we find ourselves shedding shoes and garments or…

— Loren Eiseley

The future is neither ahead nor behind, on one side or another. Nor is it dark or light. It is contained within…

— 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…

— Loren Eiseley

One could not pluck a flower without troubling a star.

— Loren Eiseley

“I once saw, on a flower pot in my own living room, the efforts of a field mouse to build a remembered…

— Loren Eiseley

Lights come and go in the night sky. Men, troubled at last by the things they build, may toss in their sleep…

— Loren Eiseley

The secret, if one may paraphrase a savage vocabulary, lies in the egg of night.

— Loren Eiseley

Without the gift of flowers and the infinite diversity of their fruits, man and bird, if they had continued to exist at…

— Loren Eiseley

“Black magic, the magic of the primeval chaos, blots out or transmogrifies the true form of things. At the stroke of twelve…

— Loren Eiseley

The iron did not remember the blood it had once moved within, the phosphorous had forgot the savage brain.

— Loren Eiseley

Man no longer dreams over a book in which a soft voice, a constant companion, observes, exhorts, or sighs with him through…

— Loren Eiseley

“Our brains dream lost ancient dreams as well as throw ropes in the air as though to catch what is uncatchable –…

— Loren Eiseley

“He has the capacity to veer with every wind, or, stubbornly, to insert himself into some fantastically elaborated and irrational social institution…

— Loren Eiseley

It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist for example Vincent Van Gogh, as it is of the great scientist, that…

— Loren Eiseley

[On common water.] Its substance reaches everywhere; it touches the past and prepares the future; it moves under the poles and wanders…

— Loren Eiseley

One (practitioner of science) is the educated man who still has a controlled sense of wonder before the universal mystery, whether it…

— Loren Eiseley

In the end, science as we know it has two basic types of practitioners. One is the educated man who still has…

— Loren Eiseley

When man becomes greater than nature, nature, which gave us birth, will respond.

— Loren Eiseley

The need is not really for more brains, the need is now for a gentler, a more tolerant people than those who…

— Loren Eiseley