Loren Eiseley

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.

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

God knows how many things a man misses by becoming smug and assuming that matters will take their own course.

Tomorrow lurks in us, the latency to be all that was not achieved before.

When the human mind exists in the light of reason and no more than reason, we may say with absolute certainty that Man and all that made him will be in that instant gone.

Many of us who walk to and fro upon our usual tasks are prisoners drawing mental maps of escape.

One could not pluck a flower without troubling a star.

Every time we walk along a beach some ancient urge disturbs us so that we find ourselves shedding shoes and garments or scavenging among seaweed and whitened timbers like the homesick refugees of a long war.

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

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

It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man.

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