Top 80 Loren Eiseley Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Loren Eiseley

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

— Loren Eiseley

3. “Each one of us is a statistical impossibility around which hover a million other lives that were never destined to be born.”

— Loren Eiseley

4. “In the desert, an old monk had once advised a traveler, the voices of God and the Devil are scarcely distinguishable.”

— Loren Eiseley

5. “We cannot pluck a flower witout disturbing a star.”

— Loren Eiseley

6. “As for men, those myriad little detached ponds with their own swarming corpuscular life, what were they but a way that water has of going about beyond the reach of rivers?”

— Loren Eiseley

7. “It is a funny thing what the brain will do with memories and how it will treasure them and finally bring them into odd juxtapositions with other things, as though it wanted to make a design, or get some meaning out of them, whether you want it or not, or even see it.”

— Loren Eiseley

8. “The freedom to create is somehow linked with facility of access to those obscure regions below the conscious mind.”

— Loren Eiseley

9. “Some degree of withdrawal serves to nurture man’s creative powers. The artist and the scientist bring out of the dark void, like the mysterious universe itself, the unique, the strange, the unexpected. Numerous observers have testified upon the loneliness of the process.”

— Loren Eiseley

10. “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

11. “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

12. “I love forms beyond my own, and regret the borders between us.”

— Loren Eiseley

13. “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

14. “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

15. “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

16. “After chiding the theologian for his reliance on myth and miracle, science found itself in the unenviable position of having to create mythology of its own: namely, the assumption that what, after long effort, could not be proved to take place today had, in truth, taken place in the primeval past.”

— Loren Eiseley

17. “Modern man lives increasingly in the future and neglects the present.”

— Loren Eiseley

18. “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

19. “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

20. “Each and all, we are riding into the dark. Even living, we cannot remember half the events of our own days.”

— Loren Eiseley

21. “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

22. “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

23. “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

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

— Loren Eiseley

25. “It has been said that great art is the night thought of man. It may emerge without warning from the soundless depths of the unconscious, just as supernovas may blaze up suddenly in the farther reaches of void space.”

— Loren Eiseley

26. “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

27. “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

28. “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

29. “The future is neither ahead nor behind, on one side or another. Nor is it dark or light. It is contained within ourselves; its evil and good are perpetually within us.”

— Loren Eiseley

30. “The great artist, whether he be musician, painter, or poet, is known for this absolute unexpectedness.”

— Loren Eiseley

31. “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

32. “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

33. “I am what I am and cannot be otherwise because of the shadows.”

— Loren Eiseley

34. “In the days of the frost seek an minor sun.”

— Loren Eiseley

35. “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

36. “Spider was circumscribed by spider ideas; its universe was spider universe. All outside was irrational, extraneous, at best raw material for spider. As I proceeded on my way along the gully, like a vast impossible shadow, I realized that in the world of spider I did not exist.”

— Loren Eiseley

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

— Loren Eiseley

38. “He was becoming something the world had never seen before – a dream animal – living at least partially within a secret universe of his own creation and sharing that secret universe in his head with other, similar heads. Symbolic communication had begun. Man had escaped out of the eternal present of the animal world into a knowledge of past and future. The unseen gods, the powers behind the world of phenomenal appearance, began to stalk through his dreams.”

— Loren Eiseley

39. “Every man contains within himself a ghost continent.”

— Loren Eiseley

40. “The secret, if one may paraphrase a savage vocabulary, lies in the egg of night.”

— Loren Eiseley

41. “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

42. “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.”

— Loren Eiseley

43. “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

44. “If you cannot bear the silence and the darkness, do not go there; if you dislike black night and yawning chasms, never make them your profession.”

— Loren Eiseley

45. “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

46. “Tomorrow lurks in us, the latency to be all that was not achieved before...”

— Loren Eiseley

47. “At the core of the universe, the face of God wears a smile.”

— Loren Eiseley

48. “The iron did not remember the blood it had once moved within, the phosphorous had forgot the savage brain.”

— Loren Eiseley

49. “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

50. “But I do love the world,” I whispered to the empty room. I love its small ones, the things beaten in the strangling surf the singing bird which falls and is not seen again, the lost ones, the failures of the world.”

— Loren Eiseley