One could not pluck a flower without troubling a star.
Loren EiseleyRead
The future is neither ahead nor behind, on one side or another. Nor is it dark or light. It is contained within ourselves; its evil and good are perpetually within us.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The future is shaped by our inner qualities, rather than external circumstances.
This quote by Loren Eiseley emphasizes that the future is not determined by external factors such as time or light but is instead a reflection of our inner selves. Our potential, both good and evil, lies within us and is what truly shapes the experiences we will encounter as we move forward.
Themes
FutureInner SelfPotentialGoodEvil
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about personal development, one might say, 'Remember, the future is contained within ourselves.'
More from Loren Eiseley
All quotes →Choices, more choices than we like afterward to believe, are made far backward in the innocence of childhood.
Loren EiseleyRead
Some degree of withdrawal serves to nurture man's creative powers. The artist and the scientist bring out of the dark void, like the mysterious universe itself, the unique, the strange, the unexpected. Numerous observers have testified upon the loneliness of the process.
Loren EiseleyRead
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.
Loren EiseleyRead
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.
Loren EiseleyRead
The need is not really for more brains, the need is now for a gentler, a more tolerant people than those who won for us against the ice, the tiger and the bear. The hand that hefted the ax, out of some old blind allegiance to the past fondles the machine gun as lovingly. It is a habit man will have to break to survive, but the roots go very deep.
Loren EiseleyRead
Similar quotes
The ultimate goal of theology isn't knowledge, but worship. If our learning and knowledge of God do not lead to the joyful praise of God, we have failed. We learn only that we might laud, which is to say that theology without doxology is idolatry. The only theology worth studying is a theology that can be sung!
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There are no more ideologies in the authentic sense of false consciousness, only advertisements for the world through its duplication and the provocative lie which does not seek belief but commands silence.
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This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one's will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence.War is god.
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Living for Sabina meant seeing. Seeing is limited by two borders: strong light, which blinds, and total darkness. Perhaps that was what motivated Sabina's distaste for all extremism. Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.
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Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.
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Mercy but murders, pardoning those that kill.
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