Quote

I am what I am and cannot be otherwise because of the shadows.

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
Shadows
Otherwise
Shadow
Cannot

More quotes by Loren Eiseley

Image
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
Image
At the core of the universe, the face of God wears a smile
Loren Eiseley
Image
From the solitude of the wood, (Man) has passed to the more dreadful solitude of the heart.
Loren Eiseley
Image
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.
Loren Eiseley
Image
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
Image
The creative element in the mind of man . . . emerges in as mysterious a fashion as those elementary particles which leap into momentary existence in great cyclotrons, only to vanish again like infinitesimal ghosts.
Loren Eiseley
Image
When the human mind exists in the light of reason and no more than reason, we may say with absolute certainty that Man and all that made him will be in that instant gone.
Loren Eiseley
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Primitives of our own species, even today are historically shallow in their knowledge of the past. Only the poet who writes speaks his message across the millennia to other hearts.
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
To have dragons one must have change that is the first principle of dragon lore.
Loren Eiseley
Image
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
Image
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
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
Image
It has been said repeatedly that one can never, try as he will, get around to the front of the universe. Man is destined to see only its far side, to realize nature only in retreat.
Loren Eiseley
Image
Choices, more choices than we like afterward to believe, are made far backward in the innocence of childhood.
Loren Eiseley
Image
I love forms beyond my own, and regret the borders between us
Loren Eiseley