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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
Like
Along
Urge
Shedding
Walk
Urges
Seaweed
Walks
Beach
Bereft
War
Shoes
Homesick
Timbers
Find
Ancient
Timber
Whitened
Every
Sea
Refugees
Avenging
Long
Ocean
Garments
Seashore
Time
Among
Refugee
Disturbs

More quotes by 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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Choices, more choices than we like afterward to believe, are made far backward in the innocence of childhood.
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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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Lights come and go in the night sky. Men, troubled at last by the things they build, may toss in their sleep and dream bad dreams, or lie awake while the meteors whisper greenly overhead. But nowhere in all space or on a thousand worlds will there be men to share our loneliness.
Loren Eiseley
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At the core of the universe, the face of God wears a smile
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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.
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There is nothing very 'normal' about nature.
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
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In the days of the frost seek an minor sun.
Loren Eiseley
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I am what I am and cannot be otherwise because of the shadows.
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Subconsciously the genius is feared as an image breaker frequently he does not accept the opinions of the mass, or man's opinion of himself.
Loren Eiseley
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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.
Loren Eiseley
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Man would not be man if his dreams did not exceed his grasp... If I remember the sunflower forest it is because from its hidden reaches man arose. The green world is his sacred center. In moments of sanity he must still seek refuge there.
Loren Eiseley
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The secret, if one may paraphrase a savage vocabulary, lies in the egg of night.
Loren Eiseley
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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
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Every man contains within himself a ghost continent.
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.
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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.
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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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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