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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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Loren Eiseley
Age: 69 †
Born: 1907
Born: September 3
Died: 1977
Died: July 9
Anthropologist
Naturalist
Philosopher
Poet
Science Writer
Lincoln
Nebraska
Million
Millions
Lives
Born
Around
Hover
Never
Statistical
Impossibility
Destined

More quotes by 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.
Loren Eiseley
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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
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The iron did not remember the blood it had once moved within, the phosphorous had forgot the savage brain.
Loren Eiseley
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From the solitude of the wood, (Man) has passed to the more dreadful solitude of the heart.
Loren Eiseley
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I am what I am and cannot be otherwise because of the shadows.
Loren Eiseley
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In the days of the frost seek an minor sun.
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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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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I love forms beyond my own, and regret the borders between us
Loren Eiseley
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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
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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 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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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
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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
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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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Every man contains within himself a ghost continent.
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 secret, if one may paraphrase a savage vocabulary, lies in the egg of night.
Loren Eiseley
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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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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