Quotes by Loren Eiseley

“If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.”

“It was the failures who had always won, but by the time they won they had come to be called successes. This is the final paradox, which men call evolution.”

“It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man.”

“One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human.”

“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.”

“One could not pluck a flower without troubling a star.”

“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.”

“Many of us who walk to and fro upon our usual tasks are prisoners drawing mental maps of escape”

“Like the herd animals we are, we sniff warily at the strange one among us.”

Once upon a time, there was a wise man who used to go to the ocean to do his writing. He had a habit of walking on the beach before he began his work.One day, as he was walking along the shore, he looked down the beach and saw a human figure moving like a dancer. He smiled to himself at the thought of someone who would dance to the day, and so, he walked faster to catch up.As he got closer, he noticed that the figure was that of a young man, and that what he was doing was not dancing at all. The young man was reaching down to the shore, picking up small objects, and throwing them into the ocean.He came closer still and called out Good morning! May I ask what it is that you are doing?The young man paused, looked up, and replied Throwing starfish into the ocean.I must ask, then, why are you throwing starfish into the ocean? asked the somewhat startled wise man.To this, the young man replied, The sun is up and the tide is going out. If I dont throw them in, theyll die.Upon hearing this, the wise man commented, But, young man, do you not realize that there are miles and miles of beach and there are starfish all along every mile? You cant possibly make a difference!At this, the young man bent down, picked up yet another starfish, and threw it into the ocean. As it met the water, he said, It made a difference for that one.

Man would not be man if his dreams did not exceed his grasp. ... Like John Donne, man lies in a close prison, yet it is dear to him. Like Donnes, his thoughts at times overleap the sun and pace beyond the body. If I term humanity a slime mold organism it is because our present environment suggest it. If I remember the sunflower forest it is because from its hidden reaches man arose. The green world is his sacred center. In moments of sanity he must still seek refuge there. ... If I dream by contrast of the eventual drift of the star voyagers through the dilated time of the universe, it is because I have seen thistledown off to new worlds and am at heart a voyager who, in this modern time, still yearns for the lost country of his birth.

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

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.

I am sure now that life is not what it is purported to be and that nature, in the canny words of the Scotch theologue, is not as natural as it looks.

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 natures 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.

Out of the choked Devonian waters emerged sight and sound and the music that rolls invisible through the composers brain. They are there still in the ooze along the tideline, though no one notices. The world is fixed, we say: fish in the sea, birds in the air. But in the mangrove swamps by the Niger, fish climb trees and ogle uneasy naturalists who try unsuccessfully to chase them back to the water. There are things still coming ashore.

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.

At the core of the universe, the face of God wears a smile

The best way to be resurrected is to be forgotten.

The evolutionists, piercing beneath the show of momentary stability, discovered, hidden in rudimentary organs, the discarded rubbish of the past. They detected the reptile under the lifted feathers of the bird, the lost terrestrial limbs dwindling beneath the blubber of the giant cetaceans. They saw life rushing outward from an unknown center, just as today the astronomer senses the galaxies fleeing into the infinity of darkness. As the spinning galactic clouds hurl stars and worlds across the night, so life, equally impelled by the centrifugal powers lurking in the germ cell, scatters the splintered radiance of consciousness and sends it prowling and contending through the thickets of the world.