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
philosophy men modern
Modern man lives increasingly in the future and neglects the present.
tomorrow
Tomorrow lurks in us, the latency to be all that was not achieved before....
loneliness night years
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.
philosophy thinking games
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.
philosophy struggle men
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.
time philosophy dark
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.
shadow i-am-what-i-am
I am what I am and cannot be otherwise because of the shadows.
men birth greater
When man becomes greater than nature, nature, which gave us birth, will respond.
animal past men
Animals are molded by natural forces they do not comprehend. To their minds there is no past and no future. There is only the everlasting present of a single generation, its trails in the forest, its hidden pathways in the the air and in the sea. There is nothing in the Universe more alone than Man. He has entered into the strange world of history.
lonely empathy humanity
This is the most enormous extension of vision of which life is capable: the projection of itself into other lives. This is the lonely, magnificent power of humanity. It is . . . the supreme epitome of the reaching out.
eye beer men
A man who has once looked with the archaeological eye will never see quite normally. He will be wounded by what other men call trifles. It is possible to refine the sense of time until an old shoe in the bunch grass or a pile of nineteenth century beer bottles in an abandoned mining town tolls in one's head like a hall clock.
judging shadow would-be
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.
mind crafts obscure
The freedom to create is somehow linked with facility of access to those obscure regions below the conscious mind.
dream loneliness lying
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.