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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.

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
Mind
Drag
Men
Locked
Like
Escape
Struggle
Philosophy
Cloven
Fear
Ariel
Spirit
Pine
Matter
Inhabit

More quotes by 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.
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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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It has been asserted that we are destined to know the dark beyond the stars before we comprehend the nature of our own journey.
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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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In the days of the frost seek an minor sun.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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From the solitude of the wood, (Man) has passed to the more dreadful solitude of the heart.
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At the core of the universe, the face of God wears a smile
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The great artist, whether he be musician, painter, or poet, is known for this absolute unexpectedness.
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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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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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I no longer cared about survival...I merely loved.
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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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It was the failures who had always won, but by the time they won they had come to be called successes.
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I am what I am and cannot be otherwise because of the shadows.
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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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There is nothing very 'normal' about nature.
Loren Eiseley