Lyall Watson Quotes & Sayings

“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.”

“Smell was our first sense. It is even possible that being able to smell was the stimulus that took a primitive fish and turned a small lump of olfactory tissue on its nerve cord into a brain. We think because we smelled.”

“Smell is a long-distance sense, a way of stretching time and finding out in advance what lies ahead.”

“Even in the lives of fishes, sensation is seldom a matter of one thing or another. Senses overlap. The lines between them often tend to be blurred, and the best that we can manage, by way of description from the outside, is to say that the senses of fishes appear to dominate one at a time.”

“I live and work alone and travel light, relying largely on my memory and making a point of letting intuition guide my way.”

“Seriously, a smaller, leaner, cleaner, tuskless and more secretive elephant is exactly what is needed. It definitely would live longer.”

“Even the cleanest air, at the centre of the South Pacific or somewhere over Antarctica, has two hundred thousand assorted bits and pieces in every lungful. And this count rises to two million or more in the thick of the Serengeti migration, or over a six-lane highway during rush hour in downtown Los Angeles.”

“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.”

“Before sight and sound hijacked our attention, we shared with all life a sort of common sense, a chemical sense that depended on direct contact with matter in the water or the air.”