Loren Eiseley Quotes (30 Quotes)

If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.

The freedom to create is somehow linked with facility of access to those obscure regions below the conscious mind.

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.

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.

One could not pluck a flower without troubling a star.

Like the herd animals we are, we sniff warily at the strange one among us.

The great artist, whether he be musician, painter, or poet, is known for this absolute unexpectedness.

God knows how many things a man misses by becoming smug and assuming that matters will take their own course.

Many of us who walk to and fro upon our usual tasks are prisoners drawing mental maps of escape

Modern man lives increasingly in the future and neglects the present.

Man is always marveling at what he has blown apart, never at what the universe has put together, and this is his limitation.

Choices, more choices than we like afterward to believe, are made far backward in the innocence of childhood.

It was the failures who had always won, but by the time they won they had come to be called successes. This is the final paradox, which men call evolution.

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.

It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man.

Of all the unexpected qualities of an unexpected universe, the sheer organizing power of animal and plant metabolism is one of the most remarkable.... Where it reaches its highest development, in the human mind, we forget it completely.... So important does nature regard this unseen combustion ... that a starving mans brain will be protected to the last while his body is steadily consumed.

Each one of us is a statistical impossibility around which hove 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.

Man no longer dreams over a book in which a soft voice, a constant companion, observes, exhorts, or sighs with him through the pangs ofyouth and age. Today he is more likely to sit before a screen and dream the mass dream which comes from outside.

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 selfwhose rationale he doubts and does not understand.

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.

One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human.

Man inhabits a realm half in and half out of nature, his mind reaching forever beyond the tool, the uniformity, the law, into some realmwhich is that of the mind alone.

From the solitude of the wood, Man has passed to the more dreadful solitude of the heart.

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 isthe spirit that they fear.

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 areperpetually within us.

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.

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.

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.

Tomorrow lurks in us, the latency to be all that was not achieved before.