Quote

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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Loren Eiseley
Age: 69 †
Born: 1907
Born: September 3
Died: 1977
Died: July 9
Anthropologist
Naturalist
Philosopher
Poet
Science Writer
Lincoln
Nebraska
Mind
Longer
Otherwise
Examined
Always
Seen
Fail
Vanished
Men
Face
Evolution
Ceased
Faces
Minds
Midnight
Wish
Forward
Survived
Great
Lived
Stood
Much
Failing
Evolve
Long
Journey
Bones

More quotes by 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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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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I am what I am and cannot be otherwise because of the shadows.
Loren Eiseley
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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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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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Each and all, we are riding into the dark. Even living, we cannot remember half the events of our own days.
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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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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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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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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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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At the core of the universe, the face of God wears a smile
Loren Eiseley
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In the days of the frost seek an minor sun.
Loren Eiseley
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Choices, more choices than we like afterward to believe, are made far backward in the innocence of childhood.
Loren Eiseley
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If it should turn out that we have mishandled our own lives as several civilizations before us have done, it seems a pity that we should involve the violet and the tree frog in our departure.
Loren Eiseley
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The plan is not what you think.
Loren Eiseley
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Over the whole earth- this infinitely small globe that possesses all we know of sunshine and bird song- an unfamiliar blight is creeping: man- man, who has become at last a planetary disease and who would, if his technology yet permitted, pass this infection to another star.
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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From the solitude of the wood, (Man) has passed to the more dreadful solitude of the heart.
Loren Eiseley
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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