Loren Eiseley Quotes

We are made out of stardust. The iron in the hemoglobin molecules in the blood in your right hand came from a star that blew up 8 billion years ago. The iron in your left hand came from another star.

We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities... still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

We are the first generation of human beings to have substantial insights into the origin of our cosmos and of human life in it.

The earth is yet the place of the domicile of man and all the offspring of the first man.

The history of mankind is confined within a limited period, and from every quarter brings an intimation that human affairs have had a beginning.

Where do we come from? What are We? Where are we going?

We've all got stardust in our bones.

Labour is the source of all wealth, the political economists assert. And it really is the source -- next to nature, which supplies it with the material that it converts into wealth. But it is even infinitely more than this. It is the prime basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labour created man himself.

We were all born of flesh, in a flare of pain. We do not remember the red roots whence we rose, but we know that we rose and walked, that after a while we shall lie down again.

Sometimes things can take a very long time and still not be very good. It took us all of evolutionary history just to get where we are today, for instance, and mostly where we are today is on the couch.

We all evolved out of the same three or four groups in Africa, as black Africans.

It is hard for the ape to believe he descended from man.

It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.

What the fossil record does do is to force us to contemplate our place on the planet. We are but one species of several hominids that inhabited Planet Earth, and like our distant cousins who went extinct fairly recently, our time on Planet Earth is also finite.

We will create life from inanimate compounds, and we will find life in space. But the life that should more immediately interest us lies between these extremes, in the middle range we all inhabit between our genes and our stars.

In some sense man is a microcosm of the universe; therefore what man is, is a clue to the universe. We are enfolded in the universe.

It is disturbing to discover in oneself these curious revelations of the validity of the Darwinian theory. If it is true that we have sprung from the ape, there are occasions when my own spring appears not to have been very far.

Living in your genome is the history of our species.

The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.

The problem is not simply that the Singularity represents the passing of humankind from center stage, but that it contradicts our most deeply held notions of being.

Knowing that we are primates, I think, is a fascinating discovery, and a very interesting and rather cheering one.

Man's biological weakness is the condition of human culture.

I'm a paleoanthropologist, and my job is to define man's place in nature and explore what makes us human.

Man is a physical and spiritual epitome of the Universe.

The powers, aspirations, and mission of man are such as to raise the study of his origin and nature, inevitably and by the very necessity of the case, from the mere physiological to the psychological stage of scientific operations.