Loren Eiseley
Loren Eiseley
Loren Eiseleywas 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...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth3 September 1907
CountryUnited States of America
single-mom men substance
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.
science religion progress
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.
men secret alphabet
Each man deciphers from the ancient alphabets of nature only those secrets that his own deeps possess the power to endow with meaning.
drawing tasks maps
Many of us who walk to and fro upon our usual tasks are prisoners drawing mental maps of escape.
faces core universe
At the core of the universe, the face of God wears a smile
lying night eggs
The secret, if one may paraphrase a savage vocabulary, lies in the egg of night.
blood iron brain
The iron did not remember the blood it had once moved within, the phosphorous had forgot the savage brain.
lonely wine sunset
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.
song stars sunshine
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.
flower thinking effort
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.
regret borders form
I love forms beyond my own, and regret the borders between us
nature men law
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.
friendship survival
I no longer cared about survival...I merely loved.
men missing matter
God knows how many things a man misses by becoming smug and assuming that matters will take their own course.