32 Quotes by Lyall Watson

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.

Genes which allow females to be less inhibited leave fewer copies of themselves than genes which persuade them to remain highly selective. Among males, the best strategy is exactly the opposite one. The maximum advantage goes to those males with the fewest inhibitions. "Love 'em and leave 'em" is not so much a nasty peice of male chauvinist piggery as an accurate reflection of biological reality.

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.

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.

If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn’t.

If elephants didn’t exist, you couldn’t invent one. They belong to a small group of living things so unlikely they challenge credulity and common sense.

The limits of sensory evolution in fish are defined very largely by their habitat. Water is physically supportive, carries some kinds of odour well, and is kind to sound – letting it travel several times faster than air will allow, but it inhibits other more personal kinds of communication.

A rose is a rose, but it is also a robin and a rabbit.

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.