Quote

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

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

More quotes by Loren Eiseley

Image
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.
Loren Eiseley
Image
I love forms beyond my own, and regret the borders between us
Loren Eiseley
Image
From the solitude of the wood, (Man) has passed to the more dreadful solitude of the heart.
Loren Eiseley
Image
The secret, if one may paraphrase a savage vocabulary, lies in the egg of night.
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
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
Image
Man inhabits a realm half in and half out of nature, his mind reaching forever beyond the tool, the uniformity, the law, into some realm which is that of the mind alone.
Loren Eiseley
Image
It was the failures who had always won, but by the time they won they had come to be called successes.
Loren Eiseley
Image
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
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
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
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
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
Image
Without the gift of flowers and the infinite diversity of their fruits, man and bird, if they had continued to exist at all, would be today unrecognizable.
Loren Eiseley
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
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
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
Image
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