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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Loren Eiseley
Age: 69 †
Born: 1907
Born: September 3
Died: 1977
Died: July 9
Anthropologist
Naturalist
Philosopher
Poet
Science Writer
Lincoln
Nebraska
War
Shoes
Homesick
Timbers
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

More quotes by Loren Eiseley

Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Loren Eiseley
Image
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
Image
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
Image
One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human.
Loren Eiseley
Image
At the core of the universe, the face of God wears a smile
Loren Eiseley
Image
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
Image
From the solitude of the wood, (Man) has passed to the more dreadful solitude of the heart.
Loren Eiseley
Image
The iron did not remember the blood it had once moved within, the phosphorous had forgot the savage brain.
Loren Eiseley
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I no longer cared about survival...I merely loved.
Loren Eiseley
Image
It was the failures who had always won, but by the time they won they had come to be called successes.
Loren Eiseley
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I am not nearly so interested in what monkey man was derived from as I am in what kind of monkey he is to become.
Loren Eiseley
Image
In the days of the frost seek an minor sun.
Loren Eiseley
Image
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