Loren Eiseley Quotes

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Animals Art Beach Birds Dreams Earth Evolution

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

Dream, Sleep, Reality

184 Copy quote
If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.

Loren Eiseley

Garden, Rivers, Lakes

The Immense Journey "The Flow of the River" (1957)

263 Copy quote
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

Gun, Past, Men

61 Copy quote
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

Civilization, Tree, Done

60 Copy quote
In the end, science as we know it has two basic types of practitioners. One 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. The second kind of observer is the extreme reductionist who is so busy stripping things apart that the tremendous mystery has been reduced to a trifle, to intangibles not worth troubling one's head about.

Loren Eiseley

Eye, Science, Men

42 Copy quote
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

Travel, Memorable, Journey

Loren Eiseley (2011). “The Immense Journey: An Imaginative Naturalist Explores the Mysteries of Man and Nature”, p.12, Vintage

40 Copy quote
Once in a lifetime, perhaps, one escapes the actual confines of the flesh. Once in a lifetime, if one is lucky, one so merges with sunlight and air and running water that whole eons, the eons that mountains and deserts know, might pass in a single afternoon without discomfort.

Loren Eiseley

Running, Journey, Air

Loren Eiseley (2011). “The Immense Journey: An Imaginative Naturalist Explores the Mysteries of Man and Nature”, p.16, Vintage

29 Copy quote
Since the first human eye saw a leaf in Devonian sandstone and a puzzled finger reached to touch it, sadness has lain over the heart of man. By this tenuous thread of living protoplasm, stretching backward into time, we are linked forever to lost beaches whose sands have long since hardened into stone. The stars that caught our blind amphibian stare have shifted far or vanished in their courses, but still that naked, glistening thread winds onward. No one knows the secret of its beginning or its end. Its forms are phantoms. The thread alone is real; the thread is life.

Loren Eiseley

Beach, Stars, Real

Loren Eiseley (2016). “The Firmament of Time: A Library of America eBook Classic”, p.39, Library of America

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Man is always marveling at what he has blown apart, never at what the universe has put together, and this is his limitation.

Loren Eiseley

Men, Together, Marveling

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We cannot pluck a flower witout disturbing a star.

Loren Eiseley

Stars, Flower, Pluck

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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

Perfect, Life Is, Appearance

Loren Eiseley (2011). “The Immense Journey: An Imaginative Naturalist Explores the Mysteries of Man and Nature”, p.59, Vintage

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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

Song, Stars, Sunshine

8 Copy quote
I love forms beyond my own, and regret the borders between us

Loren Eiseley

Regret, Borders, Form

30 Copy quote
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

Single Mom, Men, Substance

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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

Littles, Today, Assumption

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When man becomes greater than nature, nature, which gave him birth, will respond.

Loren Eiseley

Men, Birth, Greater

"The Invisible Pyramid".

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Though men in the mass forget the origins of their need, they still bring wolfhounds into city apartments, where dog and man both sit brooding in wistful discomfort. The magic that gleams an instant between Argos and Odysseus is both the recognition of diversity and the need for affection across the illusions of form. It is nature's cry to homeless, far-wandering, insatiable man: "Do not forget your brethren, nor the green wood from which you sprang. To do so is to invite disaster.

Loren Eiseley

Dog, Men, Cities

52 Copy quote
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

Beach, War, Ocean

Loren Eiseley (2016). “The Unexpected Universe: A Library of America eBook Classic”, p.45, Library of America

46 Copy quote
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

Religious, Men, Vision

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Perhaps a creature of so much ingenuity and deep memory is almost bound to grow alienated from his world, his fellows, and the objects around him. He suffers from a nostalgia for which there is no remedy upon earth except as it is to be found in the enlightenment of the spirit--some ability to have a perceptive rather than an exploitive relationship with his fellow creatures.

Loren Eiseley

Nature, Memories, Suffering

Loren Eiseley (2016). “The Invisible Pyramid: A Library of America eBook Classic”, p.114, Library of America

37 Copy quote
Animals are molded by natural forces they do not comprehend. To their minds there is no past and no future. There is only the everlasting present of a single generation, its trails in the forest, its hidden pathways in the the air and in the sea. There is nothing in the Universe more alone than Man. He has entered into the strange world of history.

Loren Eiseley

Animal, Past, Men

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We think we learn from teachers, and we sometimes do. But the teachers are not always to be found in school or in great laboratories. Sometimes what we learn depends upon our own powers of insight.

Loren Eiseley

Teacher, Learning, School

Loren Eiseley (2016). “The Unexpected Universe: A Library of America eBook Classic”, p.43, Library of America

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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... Mostly the animals understand their roles, but man, by comparison, seems troubled by a message that, it is often said, he cannot quite remember or has gotten wrong... Bereft of instinct, he must search continually for meanings... Man was a reader before he became a writer, a reader of what Coleridge once called the mighty alphabet of the universe.

Loren Eiseley

Beach, War, Animal

"The Unexpected Universe". Book by Loren Eiseley, www.wired.com. 1964.

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A man who has once looked with the archaeological eye will never see quite normally. He will be wounded by what other men call trifles. It is possible to refine the sense of time until an old shoe in the bunch grass or a pile of nineteenth century beer bottles in an abandoned mining town tolls in one's head like a hall clock.

Loren Eiseley

Eye, Beer, Science

Loren Eiseley (2016). “The Night Country: A Library of America eBook Classic”, p.68, Library of America

14 Copy quote
The plan is not what you think.

Loren Eiseley

Thinking, Plans

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Born: September 3, 1907
Died: July 9, 1977
Occupation: Science writer
Cite this Page: Citation

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