Quote

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

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
Moment
Intuition
Thither
Understand
Forests
Hither
Next
Instinct
Intuitions
Moments
Blind
Rationale
Nature
Whose
Dragged
Doe
Higher
Doubts
Self
Strange
Instincts
Men
Doubt
Forest

More quotes by Loren Eiseley

Image
Man no longer dreams over a book in which a soft voice, a constant companion, observes, exhorts, or sighs with him through the pangs of youth and age. Today he is more likely to sit before a screen and dream the mass dream which comes from outside.
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
To have dragons one must have change that is the first principle of dragon lore.
Loren Eiseley
Image
I love forms beyond my own, and regret the borders between us
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
In the days of the frost seek an minor sun.
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
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
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
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
The iron did not remember the blood it had once moved within, the phosphorous had forgot the savage brain.
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
From the solitude of the wood, (Man) has passed to the more dreadful solitude of the heart.
Loren Eiseley
Image
I am what I am and cannot be otherwise because of the shadows.
Loren Eiseley
Image
Each and all, we are riding into the dark. Even living, we cannot remember half the events of our own days.
Loren Eiseley
Image
The plan is not what you think.
Loren Eiseley
Image
A man who has once looked with the archaeological eye will never see quite normally. He will be wounded by what other men call trifles. It is possible to refine the sense of time until an old shoe in the bunch grass or a pile of nineteenth century beer bottles in an abandoned mining town tolls in one's head like a hall clock.
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
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
Like the herd animals we are, we sniff warily at the strange one among us.
Loren Eiseley