Top 80 Loren Eiseley Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Fire, as we have learned to our cost, has an insatiable hunger to be fed. It is a nonliving force that can even locomote itself.”

— Loren Eiseley

52. “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

53. “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

54. “Subconsciously the genius is feared as an image breaker; frequently he does not accept the opinions of the mass, or man’s opinion of himself.”

— Loren Eiseley

55. “To have dragons one must have change; that is the first principle of dragon lore.”

— Loren Eiseley

56. “When the human mind exists in the light of reason and no more than reason, we may say with absolute certainty that Man and all that made him will be in that instant gone.”

— Loren Eiseley

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

— Loren Eiseley

58. “Certainly science has moved forward. But when science progresses, it often opens vaster mysteries to our gaze. Moreover, science frequently discovers that it must abandon or modify what it once believed. Sometimes it ends by accepting what it has previously scorned.”

— Loren Eiseley

59. “We have joined the caravan, you might say, at a certain point; we will travel as far as we can, but we cannot in a lifetime see all that we would like to see or learn all that we hunger to know.”

— Loren Eiseley

60. “There is nothing more alone in the universe than man. He is alone because he has the intellectual capacity to know that he is separated by a vast gulf of social memory and experiment from the lives of his animal associates.”

— Loren Eiseley

61. “With the failure of these many efforts, science was left in the somewhat embarrassing position of having to postulate theories of living origins which it could not demonstrate. After having chided the theologian for his reliance on myth and miracle, science found itself in the inevitable position of having to create a mythology of its own: namely, the assumption that what, after long effort could not prove to take place today had, in truth, taken place in the primeval past.”

— Loren Eiseley

62. “Our brains dream lost ancient dreams as well as throw ropes in the air as though to catch what is uncatchable – the future.”

— Loren Eiseley

63. “Nothing grows among its pinnacles; there is no shade except under great toadstools of sandstone whose bases have been eaten to the shape of wine glasses by the wind. Everything is flaking, cracking, disintegrating, wearing away in the long, inperceptible weather of time. The ash of ancient volcanic outbursts still sterilizes its soil, and its colors in that waste are the colors that flame in the lonely sunsets on dead planets.”

— Loren Eiseley

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

— Loren Eiseley

65. “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

66. “There is nothing very ‘normal’ about nature.”

— Loren Eiseley

67. “If ‘dead’ matter has reared up this curious landscape of fiddling crickets, song sparrows, and wondering men, it must be plain even to the most devoted materialists that the matter of which he speaks contains amazing, if not dreadful, powers, and may not impossibly be, as Thomas Hardy has suggested, ’but one mask of many worn by the Great Face behind.”

— Loren Eiseley

68. “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

69. “God knows how many things a man misses by becoming smug and assuming that matters will take their own course.”

— Loren Eiseley

70. “Man inhabits a realm half in and half out of nature, his mind reaching forever beyond the tool, the uniformity, the law, into some realm which is that of the mind alone.”

— Loren Eiseley

71. “Taking a final pleasure in what the wind can neither proclaim nor destroy, I am a student of nightfall, I claim no other profession.”

— Loren Eiseley

72. “Some men are daylight readers, who peruse the ambiguous wording of clouds or the individual letter shapes of wandering birds. Some, like myself, are librarians of the night, whose ephemeral documents consist of root-inscribed bones or whatever rustles in the thickets upon solitary walks.”

— Loren Eiseley

73. “Perhaps he knew, there in the grass by the waters, that he had before him an immense journey.”

— Loren Eiseley

74. “No utilitarian philosophy explains a snow crystal, no doctrine of use or disuse. Water has merely leapt out of vapor and thin nothingness in the night sky to array itself in form. There is no logical reason for the existence of a snow-flake any more than there is for evolution. It is an apparition from that mysterious shadow world beyond nature, that final world which contains – if anything contains – the explanation of men and catfish and green leaves.”

— Loren Eiseley

75. “Choices, more choices than we like afterward to believe, are made far backward in the innocence of childhood.”

— Loren Eiseley

76. “This is the root of magic and science, life’s response to uncertainties. Magic runs to the beginnings of life because life is a gift and uncertain.”

— Loren Eiseley

77. “It was the failures who had always won, but by the time they won they had come to be called successes.”

— Loren Eiseley

78. “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

79. “Man no longer dreams over a book in which a soft voice, a constant companion, observes, exhorts, or sighs with him through the pangs of youth and age. Today he is more likely to sit before a screen and dream the mass dream which comes from outside.”

— Loren Eiseley

80. “The plan is not what you think.”

— Loren Eiseley

81. “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

82. “The teacher must ever walk warily between the necessity of inducing those conformities which in every generation reaffirm our rebellious humanity, and of allowing for the free play of the creative spirit.”

— Loren Eiseley

83. “The violence in Hutton’s raindrop is equaled, if not surpassed, by the violence contained in a microscopic genetic particle. The one, multiplied, carries away a mountain range. The other crosses an ice age and produces, on its far side, a man-ape whose intellectual powers now endanger his own civilization.”

— Loren Eiseley