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 More Quotes by Loren Eiseley More Quotes From Loren Eiseley In the desert, an old monk had once advised a traveler, the voices of God and the Devil are scarcely distinguishable. Loren Eiseley desert devil voice 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 what-if fire order Life, unlike the inanimate, will take the long way round to circumvent barrenness. A kind of desperate will resides even in a root. Loren Eiseley roots life long 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 assumption littles today One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human. Loren Eiseley eye reflection animal 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 loneliness dream lying 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 stars real beach When man becomes greater than nature, nature, which gave him birth, will respond. Loren Eiseley birth greater men It has been said repeatedly that one can never, try as he will, get around to the front of the universe. Man is destined to see only its far side, to realize nature only in retreat. Loren Eiseley nature trying men The secret, if one may paraphrase a savage vocabulary, lies in the egg of night. Loren Eiseley vocabulary night lying To have dragons one must have change; that is the first principle of dragon lore. Loren Eiseley dragons principles firsts 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 fashion creative men Primitives of our own species, even today are historically shallow in their knowledge of the past. Only the poet who writes speaks his message across the millennia to other hearts. Loren Eiseley heart writing past 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 nature self men I was a shadow among shadows brooding over the fate of other shadows that I alone strove to summon up out of the all-pervading dusk. Loren Eiseley brooding fate shadow 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 struggle fear philosophy Tomorrow lurks in us, the latency to be all that was not achieved before. Loren Eiseley tomorrow 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 effort flower thinking 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 light eye men 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 impressed sleep life
