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For the first time in four billion years a living creature had contemplated himself and heard with a sudden, unaccountable loneliness, the whisper of the wind in the night reeds.

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
Billions
Firsts
Unaccountable
First
Loneliness
Contemplated
Years
Creatures
Reeds
Time
Wind
Whisper
Heard
Billion
Four
Sudden
Living
Creature
Night

More quotes by Loren Eiseley

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What if I am, in some way, only a sophisticated fire that has acquired an ability to regulate its rate of combustion and to hoard its fuel in order to see and walk?
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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.
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It is surely one of the curious paradoxes of history that science which professionally has little to do with faith, owes its origins to an act of faith that the universe can be rationally interpreted, and that science today is sustained by that assumption.
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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.
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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It has been said that great art is the night thought of man. It may emerge without warning from the soundless depths of the unconscious, just as supernovas may blaze up suddenly in the farther reaches of void space.
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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.
Loren Eiseley
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Great minds have always seen it. That is why man has survived his journey this long. When we fail to wish any longer to be otherwise than what we are, we will have ceased to evolve. Evolution has to be lived forward. I say this as one who has stood above the bones of much that has vanished, and at midnight has examined his own face.
Loren Eiseley
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The plan is not what you think.
Loren Eiseley
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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.
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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.
Loren Eiseley
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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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One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human.
Loren Eiseley