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’s 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.

"If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water."  The Immense Journey, 1957   Loren Eiseley

The freedom to create is somehow linked with facility of access to those obscure regions below the conscious mind.

Choices, more choices than we like afterward to believe, are made far backward in the innocence of childhood.

Man no longer dreams over a book in which a soft voice, a constant companion, observes, exhorts, or sighs with him through the pangs of youth and age. Today he is more likely to sit before a screen and dream the mass dream which comes from outside.

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

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

Content is a word unknown to life; it is also a word unknown to man.

Mind is locked in matter like the spirit Ariel in a cloven pine. Like Ariel, men struggle to escape the drag of the matter they inhabit, yet it is the spirit that they fear.

Modern man lives increasingly in the future and neglects the present.