123 Quotes by Loren Eiseley

Of all the unexpected qualities of an unexpected universe, the sheer organizing power of animal and plant metabolism is one of the most remarkable. . . . Where it reaches its highest development, in the human mind, we forget it completely. . . . So important does nature regard this unseen combustion . . . that a starving man's brain will be protected to the last while his body is steadily consumed.

I am not nearly so interested in what monkey man was derived from as I am in what kind of monkey he is to become.

It was the failures who had always won, but by the time they won they had come to be called successes.

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.

From the solitude of the wood, (Man) has passed to the more dreadful solitude of the heart.

The great artist, whether he be musician, painter, or poet, is known for this absolute unexpectedness.

There is nothing very 'normal' about nature.

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.

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.