"It is a special kind of enlightenment..." - Quote by Alan Watts
It is a special kind of enlightenment to have this feeling that the usual, the way things normally are, is odduncanny and highly improbable. G.K.Chesterton once said that it is one thing to be amazed at gorgon or a griffin, creatures which do not exist; but it is quite another and much higher thing to be amazed at a rhinoceros or a giraffe, creatures which do exist and look as if they don't. This feeling of universal oddity includes a basic and intense wondering about the sense of things.
More by Alan Watts
“It is also in despair of being able to understand or make any productive contribution to the highly organised chaos of our politico-economic system that large numbers of people simply abandon political and social committments. They just let society be taken over by a pattern of organisation which is as self-proliferative as a weed, and whose ends and values are neither human nor instinctive but mechanical.”
“Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them.”
“Cows scream louder than carrots.”
More on Wonder
“Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.”
“The world, like a great iris of an even more gigantic eye, which has also just opened and stretched out to encompass everything, stared back at him.”
“The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me.”
More on Perception
“Yes, I answered you last night; No, this morning, sir, I say: Colors seen by candle-light Will not look the same by day.”
“Praise is more obtrusive than a reproach.”
“When we are high and airy hundreds sayThat if we hold that flight they'll leave the place,While those same hundreds mock another dayBecause we have made our art of common things.”