Loren Eiseley Short Quotes

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Things get odder on this planet, not less so.

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

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

Loren Eiseley
Content is a word unknown to life; it is also a word unknown to man.

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

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

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

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

Loren Eiseley
Man bitterly resists the lonely thought that he may be the only creature of his kind in the universe.

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

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

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

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

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

Loren Eiseley
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.

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
Every man contains within himself a ghost continent—a place circled as warily as Antarctica was circled two hundred years ago by Captain James Cook.

Loren Eiseley
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.

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
The true poet is just such a fortunate creation as the elusive crab. He is born wary and is frequently in retreat because he is a protector of the human spirit.

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
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
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.

Loren Eiseley
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.

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
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.

Loren Eiseley
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.

Loren Eiseley