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

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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.
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At the core of the universe, the face of God wears a smile
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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.
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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.
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There is nothing very 'normal' about nature.
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It has been said that great art is the night thought of man. It may emerge without warning from the soundless depths of the unconscious, just as supernovas may blaze up suddenly in the farther reaches of void space.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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One (practitioner of science) 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.
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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
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I am what I am and cannot be otherwise because of the shadows.
Loren Eiseley
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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.
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When man becomes greater than nature, nature, which gave him birth, will respond.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
Loren Eiseley