Loren Eiseley Quotes

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

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

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
Men argue learnedly over whether life is chemical chance or anti-chance, but they seem to forget that the life in chemicals may be the greatest chance of all, the most mysterious and unexplainable property in matter.

Loren Eiseley
Somewhere, somehow, sometime, in the mysterious chemistry of carbon, the long march toward the talking animal had begun.

Loren Eiseley
Archaeology is the science of man's evening, not of his midday triumphs.

Loren Eiseley
It has ever been my lot, though formally myself a teacher, to be taught surely by none. There are times when I have thought to read lessons in the sky, or in books, or from the behavior of my fellows, but in the end my perceptions have frequently been inadequate or betrayed.

Loren Eiseley
Thus science, as it leads men further and further from the first world they inhabited, the world we call natural, into a new and unguessed domain, is beguiling them.

Loren Eiseley
Animals are molded by natural forces they do not comprehend. To their minds there is no past and no future. There is only the everlasting present of a single generation — its trails in the forest, its hidden pathways in the air and in the sea.

Loren Eiseley
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.

Loren Eiseley
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.

Loren Eiseley
The door to the past is a strange door. It swings open and things pass through it, but they pass in one direction only. No man can return across that threshold, though he can look down still and see the green light waver in the water weeds.

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
Tyrannosaurs, enormous bipedal caricatures of men, would stalk mindlessly across the sites of future cities and go their way down into the dark of geologic time.

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
Certainly science has moved forward. But when science progresses, it often opens vaster mysteries to our gaze. Moreover, science frequently discovers that it must abandon or modify what it once believed. Sometimes it ends by accepting what it has previously scorned.

Loren Eiseley
In the millions of planets and infinity of time - surely there must be a possibility that man is not a unique event.

Loren Eiseley
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?

Loren Eiseley
All this masquerade is only skin deep. The mimic never becomes the model, anymore than the walking-stick insect becomes the twig. The mask may fool the mimic's enemies, but it will not deceive a zoologist.

Loren Eiseley
Things get odder on this planet, not less so.

Loren Eiseley
There is something, particularly in a spider monkey's tail, that is too bold and purposeful to be easily called the product of simple chance. It floats there like a complete little personality. At least it may cause the true philosopher to pause hesitantly and ponder before he dismisses the universe as totally a world of chance.

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
In three billion years of slow change and groping effort only one living creature has succeeded in escaping the trap of specialization that has led in time to so much death and wasted endeavor. It is man, but the word should be uttered softly, for his story is not yet done.

Loren Eiseley
From the oscillating universe, beating like a gigantic heart, to the puzzling existence of antimatter, order, in a human sense, is at least partially an illusion. Ours, in reality, is the order of a time, and of an insignificant fraction of the cosmos, seen by the limited senses of a finite creature.

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

Loren Eiseley
Man without writing cannot long retain his history in his head. His intelligence permits him to grasp some kind of succession of generations; but without writing, the tale of the past rapidly degenerates into fumbling myth and fable.

Loren Eiseley
The holy, hangs undisturbed over the whales' huge cradle.

Loren Eiseley
In the end the sea rejects its offspring. They cannot fight their way home through the surf which casts them repeatedly back upon the shore. The tiny breathing pores of starfish are stuffed with sand. The rising sun shrivels the mucilaginous bodies of the unprotected. The seabeach and its endless war are soundless. Nothing screams but the gulls.

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

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