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1 " To have dragons one must have change; that is the first principle of dragon lore. "
― Loren Eiseley , The Night Country
2 " It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man. If he is more than a popularstory-teller it may take humanity a generation to absorb and grow accustomed to the new geography with which the scientist or artist presents us.... In short, like the herd animals we are, we sniff warily at the strange one among us. If he is fortunate enough finally to be accepted, it is likely to be after a trial of ridicule and after the sting has been removed from his work by long familiarization and bowdlerizing, when the alien quality of his thought has been mitigated or removed. "
3 " A world like that is not really natural, or (the thought strikes one later) perhaps it really is, only more so. Parts of it are neither land nor sea and so everything is moving from one element to another, wearing uneasily the queer transitional bodies that life adopts in such places. Fish, some of them, come out and breathe air and sit about watching you. Plants take to eating insects, mammals go back to the water and grow elongate like fish, crabs climb trees. Nothing stays put where it began because everything is constantly climbing in, or climbing out, of its unstable environment. "
4 " If you cannot bear the silence and the darkness, do not go there; if you dislike black night and yawning chasms, never make them your profession. "
5 " The teacher must ever walk warily between the necessity of inducing those conformities which in every generation reaffirm our rebellious humanity, and of allowing for the free play of the creative spirit. "
6 " There are subjects for which I have more than ordinary affection because they are associated in my mind with kindly and understanding men orwomen--sculptors who left even upon such impliant clay as mine the delicate chiseling of refined genius, who gave unwittingly something of their final character to most unpromising material. "
7 " I once saw, on a flower pot in my own living room, the efforts of a field mouse to build a remembered field. I have lived to see this episode repeated in a thousand guises, and since I have spent a large portion of my life in the shade of a nonexistent tree I think I am entitled to speak for the field mouse. "
8 " Science can be--and is--used by good men, but in its present sense it can scarcely be said to create them. Science, of course, in discovery represents the individual, but in the moment of triumph, science creates uniformity through which the mind of the individual once more flees away.... Man inhabits a realm half in and half out of nature, his mind reaching forever beyond the tool, the uniformity, the law, into some realm which is that of mind alone. "
9 " I one saw, on a flowerpot in my own living room, the efforts of a field mouse to rebuild a remembered field. I have lived to see this episode repeated in a thousand guises, and since i have spent a large portion of my life in the shade of a non-existent tree, i think i am entitled to speak for the field mouse. (As quoted by Richard Powers in The Echo Maker) "