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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.
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
Self
Strange
Instincts
Men
Doubt
Forest
Moment
Intuition
Thither
Understand
Forests
Hither
Next
Instinct
Intuitions
Moments
Blind
Rationale
Nature
Whose
Dragged
Doe
Higher
Doubts
More quotes by 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
The iron did not remember the blood it had once moved within, the phosphorous had forgot the savage brain.
Loren Eiseley
When man becomes greater than nature, nature, which gave him birth, will respond.
Loren Eiseley
The great artist, whether he be musician, painter, or poet, is known for this absolute unexpectedness.
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
The plan is not what you think.
Loren Eiseley
Lights come and go in the night sky. Men, troubled at last by the things they build, may toss in their sleep and dream bad dreams, or lie awake while the meteors whisper greenly overhead. But nowhere in all space or on a thousand worlds will there be men to share our loneliness.
Loren Eiseley
Like the herd animals we are, we sniff warily at the strange one among us.
Loren Eiseley
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
It was the failures who had always won, but by the time they won they had come to be called successes.
Loren Eiseley
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
Every man contains within himself a ghost continent.
Loren Eiseley
Choices, more choices than we like afterward to believe, are made far backward in the innocence of childhood.
Loren Eiseley
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.
Loren Eiseley
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
One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human.
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
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
I am what I am and cannot be otherwise because of the shadows.
Loren Eiseley
The secret, if one may paraphrase a savage vocabulary, lies in the egg of night.
Loren Eiseley