Loren Eisele's Quotes - Serious, Interesting, Inspiring, Entertaining, Enlightening Thoughts of American Anthropologist, Educator, Philosopher and Natural Science Writer

Loren Eisele was born on 3 September 1907 in Lincoln, Nebraska, USA. Loren Eisele was a noted American anthropologist, educator, philosopher and natural science writer who taught and wrote books of great importance from the 1950s to the 1970s. Loren Eisele received several honorary degrees and was a Fellow of several professional organizations. At the time of his death he was the Benjamin Franklin Professor of Anthropology and History of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Once commenting on some of Loren Eisele's contributions, the editor of The Bloomsbury Review wrote - There can be no question that Loren Eisele occupies a prominent place among nature writers. His expanding explorations of human life and mind, which take place against the backdrop of our own and other universes, Eisele leapt forward at a time when science was science, and literature was, well, literature... His writings brought science to non-scientists in the lyrical language of earthy metaphor, irony, simile and narrative, all moving along like a good mystery.

On October 25, 2007, Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman officially declared that year to be Loren Eisele's centennial year. In a written proclamation he encouraged all Nebraskans to read Loren Eisele's writings and to appreciate the richness and beauty of his language in those writings, his ability to portray the long, slow passage of time and the meaning of the past in the present, his portrayal of the relationships between all living things, and his concern for the future.

Every time we walk on the beach some ancient desire haunts us, so that we find ourselves taking off shoes and clothes or searching like refugees of a long war among the seaweed and whitewood… Most animals understand their roles, but man, by comparison, seems troubled by a message which, often said, he cannot remember correctly or has misplaced… Devoid of instinct, he must constantly search for meanings… Man was a reader before he became a writer, the reader whom Coleridge once called the mighty alphabet of the universe. Over the whole earth – this infinitely small globe in which we know everything about sunshine and birdsong – an unknown plague is creeping: man – man, who has finally become a planetary disease and who, if his technology still allows, will spread this infection to every other star.

Here are some serious, interesting, inspiring, entertaining, enlightening quotes by Loren Eisele

A person who has once seen archaeologically will never be able to see normally. He will be wounded by things that other people call trivial.

It is possible to refine the sense of time until an old shoe in a haystack or a pile of nineteenth-century beer bottles in an abandoned mining town begins to ring in one's head like a hall clock.

Sadness has haunted the heart of man ever since the first human eye saw a leaf in Devonian sandstone and a puzzled finger reached out to touch it. Moving backwards in time by this slender thread of living protoplasm we are forever linked to lost beaches whose sands have long ago turned to stone. The stars that catch our blind amphibious gaze have moved away or disappeared on their way but still that bare, shining thread continues on. No one knows the mystery of its beginning or end. Its forms are phantoms. Only the thread is real, the thread is life.

It is a common refrain in all religious thought, even in the most primitive, that a man seeking vision and insight should withdraw for a time into the wilderness from his companions and love.

Perhaps a being of such simplicity and deep memory must almost withdraw from his world, from his companions and the objects around him. He suffers from a nostalgia for which there is no cure on earth except that which may be found in the enlightenment of the soul, some capacity to have a perceptive rather than an exploitative relation with his fellow beings.

Whenever we walk on the beach some ancient desire troubles us so that we find ourselves taking off shoes and clothes or searching like refugees of a long war among the seaweed and the whitewood.

Animals are moulded by natural forces they do not understand. In their minds there is neither past nor future. There is only the everlasting present of a single generation, its traces in the forest, its hidden paths in the wind and in the sea. There is nothing more lonely in the universe than man. He has entered the strange world of history.

We think we learn from teachers and sometimes we do. But teachers are not always to be found in schools or in large laboratories. Sometimes what we learn depends on our own powers of insight.

Though men in the masses forget the origin of their need, they still bring the wolfhound into the city apartments, where both dog and man sit in discomfort. The magic that flashes in a moment between Argos and Odysseus is both the recognition of diversity and the need for affection beyond the illusion of form. It is nature's call to homeless, far-flung wandering, insatiable man, forget not your brothers, nor the green forest from which you sprang. To do so is to invite disaster.

When man becomes greater than nature, nature, which gave birth to him, will respond.

It is surely one of the strange paradoxes of history that science which professionally has little to do with faith owes its origins to the act of believing that the universe can be rationally explained and that science today is sustained by that very assumption.

I like the forms beyond us, and regret the boundaries between us. We are but one of many forms of the thing called life, we are not its full image, for there is no full image of it except life and life is multitudinous and emergent in the stream of time. We cannot pluck a flower without disturbing a star.

Man always marvels at what he has plucked, never at what the universe has added and that is his limit. Perhaps once in a lifetime one escapes the universe into the true limitations of the body. Once in a lifetime if one is lucky one merges with sunlight, wind and flowing water in such a way that whole ages, ages of mountain and desert, can pass in a single afternoon without any trouble.

The journey is difficult, too great. We would travel as much as we could, but we cannot in one lifetime see all we wish to see or learn all we are eager to know.

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 in the face of the universal mystery whether hidden in the eye of the snail or within the light that falls on that delicate organ. The other type of observer is the extreme reductionist who is so busy taking things apart that the tremendous mystery turns into a trivial, abstract thing not worth troubling one's head about.

More brains are not really needed. What is needed now is a gentler, more tolerant people than those who won the victories for us against the ice, the tiger, and the bear. The hand that wielded the axe, out of some old blind loyalty to the past, also caresses the machine gun lovingly. It is a habit which man must give up in order to survive, but its roots are too deep.

If it turns out that we have mishandled our lives, as so many civilizations before us have done, it will be regrettable that we must include the violet and the tree frog in our departure.

If there is magic on this planet, it lies in the water.

We are rag dolls made of many ages and skins, who have slept in wooden nests and puffed away in the strange guise of amphibians. We have played such roles far longer than we have been human. Our identities are a dream. We are process, not reality.

For the first time in four billion years a living being had contemplated itself and listened with sudden, inexplicable loneliness to the whispering of the wind in the night reeds.

The truth, however, is that there is nothing very ordinary about nature. There was a time when there were no flowers.

As we passed under a street lamp I noticed that next to my own moving shadow, there was another, larger, bouncing oddity that gave a peculiar hint of the frog world... judging by the shadow, it was flying higher and more cheerful than I was. Very well, you will say, why didn't you turn back. That would be the scientific thing to do.

But let me tell you this is not done, not on an empty street in the middle of the night.