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Loren Eiseley Biography

Loren Eiseley (September 3, 1907 – July 9, 1977) was an American anthropologist, educator, philosopher, and natural science writer, who taught and published books from the 1950s through the 1970s. He received many honorary degrees and was a fellow of multiple professional societies. At his death, he was Benjamin Franklin Professor of Anthropology and History of Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Loren Eiseley Quotes

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.

Found, Insight, Learning, School, Teacher, Think

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.

Men, Light, Mind, Say, Gone, Reason

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

Lies, Lying, Night, Savage, Vocabulary

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.

Chiding, Long, Myth, Origin Of Life, Past, Taken

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

Advised, Desert, Devil, Monk, Old, Voice

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

Drawing, Maps, Mental, Tasks, Usual

It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist for example Vincent Van Gogh, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man. If he is more than a popular story-teller it may take humanity a generation to absorb and grow accustomed to the new geography with which the scientist or artist presents us. Even then, perhaps only the more imaginative and literate may accept him. 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.

Absorb, Art, Feared, Humanity, Men, Take

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.

Drag, Fear, Matter, Philosophy, Spirit, Struggle

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. If you fear the sound of water hurrying through crevices toward unknown and mysterious destinations, do not consider it. Seek out the sunshine. It is a simple prescription. Avoid the darkness.

Crevices, Darkness, Dislike, Night, Simple, Sunshine

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?

Fire, Order, What If, Ability, Combustion, Hoard

As we passed under a streetlamp I noticed, beside my own bobbing shadow, another great, leaping grotesquerie that had an uncanny suggestion of the frog world about it. . . judging from the shadow, it was soaring higher and more gaily than myself. 'Very well,' you will say, 'Why didn’t you turn around. That would be the scientific thing to do. ' But let me tell you it is not done ― not on an empty road at midnight.

Judging, Shadow, Suggestions, Scientific, Under, Frog

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.

Journey, Lifetime, Like, Memorable, Travel

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.

Blind, Dragged, Hither, Men, Nature, Self

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.

Dark, Evil, Future, Perpetually, Philosophy, Time

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

Crafts, Creativity, Facility, Freedom, Linked, Mind

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.

Elementary, Men, Moment, Single Mom, Substance, Time

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.

Eye, Know, Men, Organ, Reduced, Science

The plan is not what you think.

Plan, Plans, Think, Thinking

I no longer cared about survival. . . I merely loved.

Friendship, Friendship Love, Loved, Merely, Survival

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.

Design, Funny Things, Juxtapositions, Memories, Things, Treasure

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