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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?
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
Ability
Acquired
Order
Sophisticated
Way
Fuel
Rate
Walk
Mankind
Hoard
Walks
Combustion
Fire
Regulate
More quotes by Loren Eiseley
Subconsciously the genius is feared as an image breaker frequently he does not accept the opinions of the mass, or man's opinion of himself.
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
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.
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
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
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
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
It was the failures who had always won, but by the time they won they had come to be called successes.
Loren Eiseley
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
The secret, if one may paraphrase a savage vocabulary, lies in the egg of night.
Loren Eiseley
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
