Loren Eiseley Quotes

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We are rag dolls made out of many ages and skins, changelings who have slept in wood nests, and hissed in the uncouth guise of waddling amphibians. We have played such roles for infinitely longer ages than we have been human. Our identity is a dream. We are process, not reality.

Loren Eiseley

Dream, Sleep, Reality

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

Loren Eiseley

Garden, Rivers, Lakes

The Immense Journey "The Flow of the River" (1957)

266 Copy quote
The need is not really for more brains, the need is now for a gentler, a more tolerant people than those who won for us against the ice, the tiger and the bear. The hand that hefted the ax, out of some old blind allegiance to the past fondles the machine gun as lovingly. It is a habit man will have to break to survive, but the roots go very deep.

Loren Eiseley

Gun, Past, Men

62 Copy quote
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.

Loren Eiseley

Civilization, Tree, Done

61 Copy quote
We are one of many appearances of the thing called Life; we are not its perfect image, for it has no perfect image except Life, and life is multitudinous and emergent in the stream of time.

Loren Eiseley

Perfect, Life Is, Appearance

Loren Eiseley (2011). “The Immense Journey: An Imaginative Naturalist Explores the Mysteries of Man and Nature”, p.59, Vintage

36 Copy quote
In the end, science as we know it has two basic types of practitioners. One 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. The second kind of observer is the extreme reductionist who is so busy stripping things apart that the tremendous mystery has been reduced to a trifle, to intangibles not worth troubling one's head about.

Loren Eiseley

Eye, Science, Men

44 Copy quote
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.

Loren Eiseley

Travel, Memorable, Journey

Loren Eiseley (2011). “The Immense Journey: An Imaginative Naturalist Explores the Mysteries of Man and Nature”, p.12, Vintage

41 Copy quote
Once in a lifetime, perhaps, one escapes the actual confines of the flesh. Once in a lifetime, if one is lucky, one so merges with sunlight and air and running water that whole eons, the eons that mountains and deserts know, might pass in a single afternoon without discomfort.

Loren Eiseley

Running, Journey, Air

Loren Eiseley (2011). “The Immense Journey: An Imaginative Naturalist Explores the Mysteries of Man and Nature”, p.16, Vintage

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

Loren Eiseley

Men, Together, Marveling

29 Copy quote
We cannot pluck a flower witout disturbing a star.

Loren Eiseley

Stars, Flower, Pluck

40 Copy quote
Since the first human eye saw a leaf in Devonian sandstone and a puzzled finger reached to touch it, sadness has lain over the heart of man. By this tenuous thread of living protoplasm, stretching backward into time, we are linked forever to lost beaches whose sands have long since hardened into stone. The stars that caught our blind amphibian stare have shifted far or vanished in their courses, but still that naked, glistening thread winds onward. No one knows the secret of its beginning or its end. Its forms are phantoms. The thread alone is real; the thread is life.

Loren Eiseley

Beach, Stars, Real

Loren Eiseley (2016). “The Firmament of Time: A Library of America eBook Classic”, p.39, Library of America

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

Loren Eiseley

Eye, Animal, Reflection

Loren Eiseley (2016). “The Unexpected Universe: A Library of America eBook Classic”, p.24, Library of America

18 Copy quote
I love forms beyond my own, and regret the borders between us

Loren Eiseley

Regret, Borders, Form

32 Copy quote
Over the whole earth- this infinitely small globe that possesses all we know of sunshine and bird song- an unfamiliar blight is creeping: man- man, who has become at last a planetary disease and who would, if his technology yet permitted, pass this infection to another star.

Loren Eiseley

Song, Stars, Sunshine

10 Copy quote
It is surely one of the curious paradoxes of history that science which professionally has little to do with faith, owes its origins to an act of faith that the universe can be rationally interpreted, and that science today is sustained by that assumption.

Loren Eiseley

Littles, Today, Assumption

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

Loren Eiseley

Dream, Book, Men

Loren Eiseley (2016). “The Night Country: A Library of America eBook Classic”, p.117, Library of America

22 Copy quote
The plan is not what you think.

Loren Eiseley

Thinking, Plans

12 Copy quote
The creature called man has a strange history. He is not of one piece, nor was he born of a single moment in time. His elementary substance is stardust almost as old as the universe.

Loren Eiseley

Single Mom, Men, Substance

11 Copy quote
Though men in the mass forget the origins of their need, they still bring wolfhounds into city apartments, where dog and man both sit brooding in wistful discomfort. The magic that gleams an instant between Argos and Odysseus is both the recognition of diversity and the need for affection across the illusions of form. It is nature's cry to homeless, far-wandering, insatiable man: "Do not forget your brethren, nor the green wood from which you sprang. To do so is to invite disaster.

Loren Eiseley

Dog, Men, Cities

54 Copy quote
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 the air and in the sea. There is nothing in the Universe more alone than Man. He has entered into the strange world of history.

Loren Eiseley

Animal, Past, Men

14 Copy quote
It is a commonplace of all religious thought, even the most primitive, that the man seeking visions and insight must go apart from his fellows and love for a time in the wilderness.

Loren Eiseley

Religious, Men, Vision

61 Copy quote
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

Life, Sleep, Impressed

Loren Eiseley (2011). “The Immense Journey: An Imaginative Naturalist Explores the Mysteries of Man and Nature”, p.192, Vintage

6 Copy quote
We think we learn from teachers, and we sometimes do. But the teachers are not always to be found in school or in great laboratories. Sometimes what we learn depends upon our own powers of insight.

Loren Eiseley

Teacher, Learning, School

Loren Eiseley (2016). “The Unexpected Universe: A Library of America eBook Classic”, p.43, Library of America

21 Copy quote
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.

Loren Eiseley

Beach, War, Ocean

Loren Eiseley (2016). “The Unexpected Universe: A Library of America eBook Classic”, p.45, Library of America

49 Copy quote
In the desert, an old monk had once advised a traveler, the voices of God and the Devil are scarcely distinguishable.

Loren Eiseley

Voice, Devil, Desert

Loren Eiseley (2016). “The Unexpected Universe: A Library of America eBook Classic”, p.62, Library of America

18 Copy quote

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Born: September 3, 1907
Died: July 9, 1977
Occupation: Science writer
Cite this Page: Citation

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