Shaun Tan Quotes

He who wonders discovers that this in itself is wonder.

The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.

To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand.

If you pay attention to the world, it's an amazing place. If you don't, it's whatever you think it is.

I'm excited about seeing things, and I'm interested in the way I think other people saw things.

I don't do a lot of research, exactly, but I'm constantly wandering through the world finding things incredible and remembering them.

Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.

The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

It is not ignorance but knowledge which is the mother of wonder.

Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.

You always admire what you really don't understand.

To be matter-of-fact about the world is to blunder into fantasy - and dull fantasy at that, as the real world is strange and wonderful.

It's nice to witness these discoveries at first hand.

The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.

The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.

All the things worth writing about are outside me. I'm a lens, not a source. And even if it's not always a comfortable journey, it's always a stimulating one.

I just go out and try to make sense of the world around me.

Use your imagination, and you'll see that even the most narrow, humdrum lives are infinite in scope if you examine them with enough care.

Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn.

Man has to awaken to wonder - and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.

I'm curious. Period. I find everything interesting. Real life. Fake life. Objects. Flowers. Cats. But mostly people. If you keep your eyes open and your mind open, everything can be interesting.

Some people look at big things, and other people look at very small things, but in a sense, we're all trying to understand the world around us.

I like it when one is not certain what one sees. When we do not know why the photographer has taken a picture and when we do not know why we are looking at it, all of a sudden we discover something that we start seeing. I like this confusion.

When we look at something that is alien to us, that is beyond our comprehension, what do we see but ourselves?

I thought of a high school report I did on the Belgian artist Rene Magritte and a quote I once read from him, something about his favorite walk being the one he took around his own bedroom. He said that he never understood the need for people to travel because all the poetry and perspective you're ever going to get you already posses. Anais Nin had the same idea. We see the world as we are. So if it's the same brain we bring with us every time we open our eyes, what's the difference if we're looking at an island cove or a pocket watch?