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Loren Eiseley
(3 Sep 1907 - 9 Jul 1977)
American anthropologist and ecologist was one of the preeminent literary naturalists of our time. He wrote for the lay person in an eloquent, poetic style about anthropology, the history of the civilization and our relationship with the natural world.
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Science Quotes by Loren Eiseley (12 quotes)
…with common water. Its substance reaches everywhere; it touches the past and prepares the future; it moves under the poles and wanders thinly in the heights of air. It can assume forms of exquisite perfection in a snowflake, or strip the living to a single shining bone cast up by the sea.
— Loren Eiseley
From essay 'The Flow of the River', collected in The Immense Journey: An Imaginative Naturalist Explores the Mysteries of Man and Nature (1957, 1959), 16.
[On common water.] Its substance reaches everywhere; it touches the past and prepares the future; it moves under the poles and wanders thinly in the heights of air. It can assume forms of exquisite perfection in a snowflake, or strip the living to a single shining bone cast up by the sea.
— Loren Eiseley
From essay 'The Flow of the River', collected in The Immense Journey: An Imaginative Naturalist Explores the Mysteries of Man and Nature (1957, 1959), 16.
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.
— Loren Eiseley
The Night Country (1971), 81.
If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.
— Loren Eiseley
From essay 'The Flow of the River', collected in The Immense Journey: An Imaginative Naturalist Explores the Mysteries of Man and Nature (1957, 1959), 15. The author is commenting on a rain pond on a flat roof seen from his office window, commenting on its “spatter of green algae” and a submarining water beetle representing how life can spring from even this puddle of water.
In the end, science as we know it has two basic types of practitioners. One 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. The second kind of observer is the extreme reductionist who is so busy stripping things apart that the tremendous mystery has been reduced to a trifle, to intangibles not worth troubling one’s head about.
— Loren Eiseley
In 'Science and the Sense of the Holy,' The Star Thrower (1978), 190.
In the nature of life and in the principles of evolution we have had our answer. Of men elsewhere, and beyond, there will be none, forever.
— Loren Eiseley
In 'Little Men and Flying Sources', The Immense Journey (1957), 162.
It has been said repeatedly that one can never, try as he will, get around to the front of the universe. Man is destined to see only its far side, to realize nature only in retreat.
— Loren Eiseley
In 'The Innocent Fox,' The Star Thrower (1978), 63.
It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man.
— Loren Eiseley
In The Night Country (1971, 1997), 208.
It was the failures who had always won, but by the time they won they had come to be called successes. This is the final paradox, which men call evolution.
— Loren Eiseley
Concluding sentence in The Star Thrower (1978, 1979), 311.
One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human.
— Loren Eiseley
In 'Introduction', The Ghost Continent (1966, 1969), 24.
The creative element in the mind of man … emerges in as mysterious a fashion as those elementary particles which leap into momentary existence in great cyclotrons, only to vanish again like infinitesimal ghosts.
— Loren Eiseley
In The Night Country (1971, 1997), 215.
This man, one of the chief architects of the atomic bomb, so the story runs, was out wandering in the woods one day with a friend when he came upon a small tortoise. Overcome with pleasurable excitement, he took up the tortoise and started home, thinking to surprise his children with it. After a few steps he paused and surveyed the tortoise doubtfully.
“What's the matter?” asked his friend.
Without responding, the great scientist slowly retraced his steps as precisely as possible, and gently set the turtle down on the exact spot from which he had taken him.
Then he turned solemnly to his friend. “It just struck me,” he said, “that, perhaps for one man, I have tampered enough with the universe.” He turned, and left the turtle to wander on its way.
“What's the matter?” asked his friend.
Without responding, the great scientist slowly retraced his steps as precisely as possible, and gently set the turtle down on the exact spot from which he had taken him.
Then he turned solemnly to his friend. “It just struck me,” he said, “that, perhaps for one man, I have tampered enough with the universe.” He turned, and left the turtle to wander on its way.
— Loren Eiseley
From Benjamin Franklin Lecture (1958) at the University of Pennsylvania, printed as 'The Ethic of the Group', in Robert Ernest Spiller, Social Control in a Free Society (1958), 37. Also in The Firmament of Time (1960), 148. Eiseley states that because he cannot vouch for the authenticity of the story, he would not name the scientist, though he hopes “with all his heart that it is true. If it is not, then it ought to be, for it illustrates well what I mean by a growing self-awareness, as sense of responsibility about the universe.”
See also:
- 3 Sep - short biography, births, deaths and events on date of Eiseley's birth.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
