123 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 is 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.

It is a commonplace of all religious thought, even the most primitive, that the man seeking visions and insight must go apart from his fellows and love for a time in the wilderness.

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.

At the core of the universe, the face of God wears a smile

With the failure of these many efforts, science was left in the somewhat embarrassing position of having to postulate theories of living origins which it could not demonstrate. After having chided the theologian for his reliance on myth and miracle, science found itself in the inevitable position of having to create a mythology of its own: namely, the assumption that what, after long effort could not prove to take place today had, in truth, taken place in the primeval past.

Already he [humanity] is physically antique in this robot world he has created. All that sustains him is that small globe of grey matter through which spin his ever-changing conceptions of the universe.

It is conceivable that in principle man's motor through-ways resemble the slime trails along which are drawn the gathering mucors that erect the spore palaces, that man's cities are only the ephemeral moment of his spawning--that he must descend upon the orchard of far worlds or die.

He has the capacity to veer with every wind, or, stubbornly, to insert himself into some fantastically elaborated and irrational social institution only to perish with it. [For man is a] fickle, erratic, dangerous creature [whose] restless mind would try all paths, all horrors, all betrayals … believe all things and believe nothing … kill for shadowy ideas more ferociously than other creatures kill for food, then, in a generation or less, forget what bloody dream had so oppressed him

Man is always marveling at what he has blown apart, never at what the universe has put together, and this is his limitation.