Quote

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

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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
Dream
Thousand
Lights
Light
Share
Nowhere
May
Sleep
Worlds
Come
Space
Awake
Meteors
Things
Lying
Loneliness
Overhead
Men
Lasts
Sky
Toss
World
Last
Build
Troubled
Night
Dreams
Whisper

More quotes by 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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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
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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.
Loren Eiseley
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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.
Loren Eiseley
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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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There is nothing very 'normal' about nature.
Loren Eiseley
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Each one of us is a statistical impossibility around which hover a million other lives that were never destined to be born.
Loren Eiseley
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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.
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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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
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To have dragons one must have change that is the first principle of dragon lore.
Loren Eiseley
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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
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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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Like the herd animals we are, we sniff warily at the strange one among us.
Loren Eiseley
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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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One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human.
Loren Eiseley
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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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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
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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
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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