Loren Eiseley Quotes

Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.

For the world is broken, sundered, busted down the middle, self ripped from self and man pasted back together as mythical monster, half angel, half beast, but no man...Some day a man will walk into my office as a ghost or beast or ghost-beast and walk out as a man, which is to say sovereign wanderer, lordly exile, worker and waiter and watcher.

Ideologies have no heart of their own. They're the whores and angels of our striving selves.

All the seven deadly sins are man's true nature. To be greedy. To be hateful. To have lust. Of course, you have to control them, but if you're made to feel guilty for being human, then you're going to be trapped in a never-ending sin-and-repent cycle that you can't escape from.

I think that Gollum is really the character who is a very human character, and he's very flawed, like most humans are, and has good and bad sides.

There is a dark side in all of us. And for us 'bad' people, the bad side dominates. I think there is a great sadness in villains, and I have tried to put that across. We cannot stop ourselves doing what we are doing.

For sin is just this, what man cannot by its very nature do with his whole being; it is possible to silence the conflict in the soul, but it is not possible to uproot it.

I've always had a fascination with vampires. It's not that I'm exactly fascinated with the dark side. It's the human struggle with it. How we deal with those two aspects of who we are. We all have those elements.

Man has no greater enemy than himself.

There's something in human nature that says we need to have at least one symbolic place where chaos and dark desires can live.

Everyone on the planet has a dark and a light. That's a multi-dimensional character.

Loki in 'Thor' is the most incredible springboard into a sort of excavation of the darker aspects of human nature. So that was thrilling, coming back knowing that I'd built the boat and now I could set sail into choppier waters.

I became the stage for the great argument between Nietzsche and Rousseau. I was the extra ready to take on all the roles.

We have a demon, we have an angel inside, within our souls, and you just play with it, and sometimes the evil part of you wins the battle, in a very important decision, or in a bedtime, with your lover. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.

My favorite Swamp Thing stories have always been about a man wrestling with monsters both internal and external.

We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives... inside ourselves.

Before we ever had a script or anything, I was attracted to the idea of playing a character that housed within himself two opposing traits.

There's a softer and harder person in everyone, depending on the time.

Self-denial does not belong to religion as characteristic of it; it belongs to human life; the lower nature must always be denied when you are trying to rise to a higher sphere.

I suddenly realized. The zebra. It is not something outside of us. The zebra is something inside of us. Our fears. Our own self-destructive nature. The zebra is the worst part of us when we are face-to-face with our worst times. The demon is us!

Beyond all explanations which a good brain can give, why do we choose the worse and not the better, why hate rather than love, why greed and not generosity, why self-centred activity and not open total action? Why be mean when there are soaring mountains and flashing streams? Why jealousy and not love? Why?

We are all civilized people, wich means that we are all savages at heart but observing a few amenities of civilized behaviour.

In all of us, even in good men, there is a lawless wild-beast nature, which peers out in sleep.

It has been my experience that people who are at cross-purposes with nature are cynical about mankind and ill at ease with themselves.

I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both.