Loren Eiseley Quotes

74 quotes in 1338 categories

• A man who has once looked with the archaeological eye will never see quite normally. He will be wounded by what other men call trifles.…
• 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…
• [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…
• 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…
• 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.
• Modern man lives increasingly in the future and neglects the present.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• Choices, more choices than we like afterward to believe, are made far backward in the innocence of childhood.
• I no longer cared about survival...I merely loved.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…

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