Lyall Watson > Quotes

“If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't.”
― Lyall Watson

“Dancing is surely the most basic and relevant of all forms of expression. Nothing else can so effectively give outward form to an inner experience. Poetry and music exist in time. Painting and architecture are a part of space. But only the dance lives at once in both space and time. In it the creator and the thing created, the artist and the expression, are one. Each participates completely in the other. There could be no better metaphor for an understanding of the mechanics of the cosmos.”
― Lyall Watson, Gifts of Unknown Things: A True Story of Nature, Healing, and Initiation from Indonesia's Dancing Island

“We try to abolish intervals by our manic insistence on keeping busy, on doing something. And as a result, all we succeed in doing is destroying all hope of tranquility.

... . You have to learn to immerse yourself in the silences between.”
― Lyall Watson, Gifts of Unknown Things: A True Story of Nature, Healing, and Initiation from Indonesia's Dancing Island

“He was his usual philosophic self and tried very hard to explain to me that although life was stained with agony, this was necessary. That scars only concealed, and finally helped to reveal, an essential peace. He said that what we, who pass so swiftly, experience as songs of love or cries of pain are only overtones to a single note in a very much larger harmony.”
― Lyall Watson, Gifts of Unknown Things: A True Story of Nature, Healing, and Initiation from Indonesia's Dancing Island

“To get to know someone new, you need to touch a lot.”
― Lyall Watson, Gifts of Unknown Things: A True Story of Nature, Healing, and Initiation from Indonesia's Dancing Island

“If you simply walk on the beach as we are doing, you have no special color. But if you travel with a purpose, it is different. When you go somewhere important or you return home from a long journey, you build a shape around you and it reaches out ahead to touch your destination.”
― Lyall Watson, Gifts of Unknown Things: A True Story of Nature, Healing, and Initiation from Indonesia's Dancing Island

“Both dance and dream are brought into being by the consciousness of a moment. They can never be repeated or successfully imitated. But you can dance and dream again. You must, if life is to continue.”
― Lyall Watson, Gifts of Unknown Things: A True Story of Nature, Healing, and Initiation from Indonesia's Dancing Island

“We are in tune, and given the chance, we do things tunefully. We dance.”
― Lyall Watson, Gifts of Unknown Things: A True Story of Nature, Healing, and Initiation from Indonesia's Dancing Island

“It is a truism among researchers into smell that all human subjects behave as if they themselves do not smell like humans, because all humans smell bad.”
― Lyall Watson, Jacobson's Organ: And the Remarkable Nature of Smell

“Life arose by order out of chaos and maintains this order by collecting information from the cosmos. Cosmic forces bombard earth all the time, but the movement of celestial bodies and the movement of earth in relation to these bodies produces a pattern that provides useful information. Life is sensitive to this pattern because it contains water, which is unstable and easily influenced. Which”
― Lyall Watson, Supernature: A Natural History of the Supernatural

“Which means that living things are involved in an open dialogue with the universe, a free exchange of information and influence that unites all life into one vast organism that is itself part of an even larger dynamic structure. There is no escaping the conclusion that the basic similarity in structure and function are ties that bind all life together and that man, for all his special features, is an integral part of this whole.”
― Lyall Watson, Supernature: A Natural History of the Supernatural

“Life keeps time, and it seems that the beat is an old one, determined mainly by the rotation of our own planet, which turns the sun on and off like some giant cosmic strobe light. Life”
― Lyall Watson, Supernature: A Natural History of the Supernatural

“War-waging and peace-making are as old as ants and apes.”
― Lyall Watson, Dark Nature: A Natural History of Evil

“A rose is a rose, but it is also a robin and a rabbit.”
― Lyall Watson, Supernature: A Natural History of the Supernatural

“We survive by controlling our environment, and control is made possible by information. So lack of information quickly breeds insecurity and a situation in which any information is regarded as better than none.”
― Lyall Watson, Supernature

“Florestas inteiras respiram em uníssono.”
― Lyall Watson

“British”
― Lyall Watson, Dark Nature