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
dark half events
Each and all, we are riding into the dark. Even living, we cannot remember half the events of our own days.
american-scientist flower pluck troubling
One could not pluck a flower without troubling a star.
frost sun minors
In the days of the frost seek an minor sun.
eye men light
One (practitioner of science) 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.
memories funny-things design
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.
life sleep impressed
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.
insatiable-hunger fire cost
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.
beach stars real
Since the first human eye saw a leaf in Devonian sandstone and a puzzled finger reached to touch it, sadness has lain over the heart of man. By this tenuous thread of living protoplasm, stretching backward into time, we are linked forever to lost beaches whose sands have long since hardened into stone. The stars that caught our blind amphibian stare have shifted far or vanished in their courses, but still that naked, glistening thread winds onward. No one knows the secret of its beginning or its end. Its forms are phantoms. The thread alone is real; the thread is life.
human-nature
It was the failures who had always won, but by the time they won they had come to be called successes.
taken past origin-of-life
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.
men together marveling
Man is always marveling at what he has blown apart, never at what the universe has put together, and this is his limitation.
heart men solitude
From the solitude of the wood, (Man) has passed to the more dreadful solitude of the heart.
artist musician poet
The great artist, whether he be musician, painter, or poet, is known for this absolute unexpectedness.
normal
There is nothing very 'normal' about nature.