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It was the failures who had always won, but by the time they won they had come to be called successes.
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
Successes
Failures
Called
Come
Always
Time
More quotes by Loren Eiseley
Choices, more choices than we like afterward to believe, are made far backward in the innocence of childhood.
Loren Eiseley
There is nothing very 'normal' about nature.
Loren Eiseley
At the core of the universe, the face of God wears a smile
Loren Eiseley
Every man contains within himself a ghost continent.
Loren Eiseley
This is the most enormous extension of vision of which life is capable: the projection of itself into other lives. This is the lonely, magnificent power of humanity. It is . . . the supreme epitome of the reaching out.
Loren Eiseley
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
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
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
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
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.
Loren Eiseley
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
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
Each and all, we are riding into the dark. Even living, we cannot remember half the events of our own days.
Loren Eiseley
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
We are one of many appearances of the thing called Life we are not its perfect image, for it has no perfect image except Life, and life is multitudinous and emergent in the stream of time.
Loren Eiseley
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
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
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
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
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