Quotes by Loren Eiseley

While I was sitting one night with a poet friend watching a great opera performed in a tent under arc lights, the poet took my arm and pointed silently. Far up, blundering out of the night, a huge Cecropia moth swept past from light to light over the posturings of the actors. “He doesn’t know,” my friend whispered excitedly. “He’s passing through an alien universe brightly lit but invisible to him. He’s in another play; he doesn’t see us. He doesn’t know. Maybe it’s happening right now to us.

"If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water."  The Immense Journey, 1957   Loren Eiseley

One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human.

Like the herd animals we are, we sniff warily at the strange one among us.

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.

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

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

Some degree of withdrawal serves to nurture man's creative powers. The artist and the scientist bring out of the dark void, like the mysterious universe itself, the unique, the strange, the unexpected. Numerous observers have testified upon the loneliness of the process.

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.

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.