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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

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Loren Eiseley
Age: 69 †
Born: 1907
Born: September 3
Died: 1977
Died: July 9
Anthropologist
Naturalist
Philosopher
Poet
Science Writer
Lincoln
Nebraska
Long
Ocean
Garments
Seashore
Time
Among
Refugee
Disturbs
Like
Along
Urge
Shedding
Walk
Urges
Seaweed
Walks
Beach
Bereft
War
Shoes
Homesick
Timbers
Find
Ancient
Timber
Whitened
Every
Sea
Refugees
Avenging

More quotes by Loren Eiseley

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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 self whose rationale he doubts and does not understand.
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It has been asserted that we are destined to know the dark beyond the stars before we comprehend the nature of our own journey.
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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.
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It is a funny thing what the brain will do with memories and how it will treasure them and finally bring them into odd juxtapositions with other things, as though it wanted to make a design, or get some meaning out of them, whether you want it or not, or even see it.
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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.
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Every man contains within himself a ghost continent.
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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
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Each man deciphers from the ancient alphabets of nature only those secrets that his own deeps possess the power to endow with meaning.
Loren Eiseley
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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
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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
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The iron did not remember the blood it had once moved within, the phosphorous had forgot the savage brain.
Loren Eiseley
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Each and all, we are riding into the dark. Even living, we cannot remember half the events of our own days.
Loren Eiseley
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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
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In the days of the frost seek an minor sun.
Loren Eiseley
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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. It is possible to refine the sense of time until an old shoe in the bunch grass or a pile of nineteenth century beer bottles in an abandoned mining town tolls in one's head like a hall clock.
Loren Eiseley
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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
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I once saw, on a flower pot in my own living room, the efforts of a field mouse to build a remembered field. I have lived to see this episode repeated in a thousand guises, and since I have spent a large portion of my life in the shade of a nonexistent tree I think I am entitled to speak for the field mouse.
Loren Eiseley
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Fire, as we have learned to our cost, has an insatiable hunger to be fed. It is a nonliving force that can even locomote itself.
Loren Eiseley
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The plan is not what you think.
Loren Eiseley
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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