One could not pluck a flower without troubling a star.
Loren EiseleyRead
Choices, more choices than we like afterward to believe, are made far backward in the innocence of childhood.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Our early choices shape our future more than we realize.
Loren Eiseley's quote highlights the profound impact that childhood experiences and decisions have on our lives. It suggests that many of the choices that define our paths are made during a time of innocence, often without a full understanding of their significance, emphasizing the importance of nurturing a thoughtful and supportive environment for children as they grow.
Themes
ChoicesChildhoodInnocenceFutureImpact
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about the importance of early education, you might say, 'As Loren Eiseley noted, the choices we make in childhood have lasting effects on our lives.'
More from Loren Eiseley
All quotes βSome 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
God knows how many things a man misses by becoming smug and assuming that matters will take their own course.
Loren EiseleyRead
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When a human being takes his life in depression, this is a natural death of spiritual causes. The modern barbarity of 'saving' the suicidal is based on a hair-raising misapprehension of the nature of existence.
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It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.
Alfred North WhiteheadRead
If you break your finger, that's on you, right? But if you get a chronic illness, if you get a serious illness or life-threatening illness, that's something I think we should all share the cost in because we all face the same unknowns and the same risks.
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Things are never as bad or as good as they seem.
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