40 Quotes by Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson, a prolific British writer, is best known for his wide-ranging literary works that span multiple genres, including philosophy, psychology, fiction, and true crime. Emerging as a prominent figure in the 1950s with his groundbreaking book "The Outsider," Wilson explored the concept of "outsiders" throughout history and delved into their unique perspectives on life and existence. This work established him as a significant existentialist thinker and garnered critical acclaim for its originality and depth of insight.
Throughout his career, Wilson authored over a hundred books, demonstrating an insatiable curiosity about the human mind, consciousness, and the mysteries of the universe. His fiction works often embraced themes of the supernatural and the occult, showcasing his ability to craft eerie and thought-provoking tales. Wilson's writing style was marked by clarity and accessibility, making complex ideas accessible to a wide readership. Although opinions on his work varied, there is no denying Colin Wilson's impact on the literary world and his enduring legacy as an intellectual who fearlessly explored the uncharted territories of the human psyche.
Colin Wilson Quotes
Life itself is an exile. The way home is not the way back.
The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain.
If you can train your senses to perceive the movement of the minute hand of a clock, what is to stop you for training them to 'slow down' when you look at a tree or a puddle?
Imagination should be used, not to escape reality but to create it.
Christianity was an epidemic rather than a religion. It appealed to fear, hysteria and ignorance. It spread across the Western world, not because it was true, but because humans are gullible and superstitious.
Turning on the light is easy if you know where the switch is.
The basic paradox about sex is that it always seems to be offering more than it can deliver. A glimpse of a girl undressing through a lighted bedroom window induces a vision of ecstatic delight, but in the actual process of persuading the girl into bed, the vision somehow evaporates.
When we pull back and get, for a moment, the 'bird's eye' view of life, it reveals meanings that are ungraspable by the narrow focus of our usual worm's eye view
When I open my eyes in the morning, I am not confronted by a world, but by a million possible worlds.
It is far easier to write an angry letter than to go and say angry things to another person - because as soon as we look in one another's faces we can see the other point of view.
Sexual activity is driven by the same aims and motives as reading poetry or listening to music: to escape the limitations imposed by the need for particularity in the consciousness.
One cannot ignore half of life for the purposes of science, and then claim that the results of science give a full and adequate picture of the meaning of life. All discussions of 'life' which begin with a description of man's place on a speck of matter in space, in an endless evolutionary scale, are bound to be half-measures, because they leave out most of the experiences which are important to use as human beings.
The worst crimes are not committed by evil degenerates, but by decent and intelligent people taking 'pragmatic' decisions.
Phenomenology is not a philosophy; it is a philosophical method, a tool. It is like an adjustable spanner that can be used for dismantling a refrigerator or a car, or used for hammering in nails, or even for knocking somebody out.
The sheer volume of evidence for survival after death is so immense that to ignore it is like standing at the foot of Mount Everest and insisting that you cannot see the mountain.
It struck me that the popularity of Christmas is a matter of web-like consciousness. Childhood conditions us to relax and expand at Christmas, to forget petty worries and irritations and think in terms of universal peace. And so Christmas is the nearest to mystical experience that most human beings ever approach, with its memories of Dickens and Irving's Bracebridge Hall.
The mystical impulse in men is somehow a desire to possess the universe. In women, it's a desire to be possessed.
I had never doubted my own abilities, but I was quite prepared to believe that "the world" would decline to recognize them.
The visionary disciplines himself to see the world always as if he had only just seen it for the first time.
But Zarathustra made it clear in which direction the answer lay; it is towards the artist-psychologist, the intuitional thinker. There are very few such men in the world's literature; the great artists are not thinkers, the great thinkers are seldom artists.
Could it be that sexual perversion and romanticism sprang from the same longing for distant horizons?
The exploration of oneself is usually also an exploration of the world at large, of other writers, a process of comparison with oneself with others, discoveries of kinships, gradual illumination of one's own potentialities.
I was aggressively nonpolitical. I believed that people who make a fuss about politics do so because their heads are too empty to think about more important things. So I felt nothing but impatient contempt for Osborne's Jimmy Porter and the rest of the heroes of social protest.
If you asked me what is the basis of all my work, it's the feeling there's something basically wrong with human beings.
The complex develops out of the simple.
No matter how honest scientists think they are, they are still influenced by various unconscious assumptions that prevent them from attaining true objectivity. Expressed in a sentence, Fort 's principle goes something like this: People with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels.
Simple perception then is a fallacy. Besides the conscious prejudices that we are aware of imposing on the world, there are a thousand subconscious prejudices that we assume to be actuality.
The "passion for incredulity" can produce as much self-deception as the uncritical will to believe.
I'm basically a writer of ideas, and the English aren't interested in ideas. The English, I'm afraid, are totally brainless.
I've always believed that a writer has got to remain an outsider.
Too much success gets you resting on your laurels and creates a kind of quicksand that you can't get out of.
Criminals interest me, because they're driven by the same desires as we are, but they take these disastrous shortcuts and end up in a real mess.
Now the basic impulse behind existentialism is optimistic, very much like the impulse behind all science. Existentialism is romanticism, and romanticism is the feeling that man is not the mere he has always taken himself for. Romanticism began as a tremendous surge of optimism about the stature of man. Its aim - like that of science - was to raise man above the muddled feelings and impulses of his everyday humanity, and to make him a god-like observer of human existence.
The real issue is not whether two and two make four or whether two and two make five, but whether life advances by men who love words or by men who love living.
It is important to grasp that boredom is one of the most common - and undesirable - consequences of 'unicameralism'. Boredom is a feeling of being 'dead inside'; that is to say, loss of contact with our instincts and feelings.
If I'd stayed on in London and carried on going to literary parties, it would have wrecked me as a writer.
Faculty X is a sense of reality of other places and other times, and it is the possession of it—fragmentary and uncertain though it is—that distinguishes man from all other animals.
It was Rousseau who was largely responsible for the problem by giving currency to the idea that freedom can exist without responsibility and discipline.
The outsider is not sure who he is. He has found an “I”, but it is not his true “I”.’ His main business is to find his way back to himself.
Man is the only animal who is prone to insanity.
Being very famous is not the fun it sounds. It merely means you're being chased by a lot of people and you lose your privacy.
Religion, mysticism and magic all spring from the same basic 'feeling' about the universe: a sudden feeling of meaning, which human beings sometimes 'pick up' accidentally, as your radio might pick up some unknown station. Poets feel that we are cut off from meaning by a thick, lead wall, and that sometimes for no reason we can understand the wall seems to vanish and we are suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of the infinite interestingness of things.
The self-surmounter can never put up with the man who has ceased to be dissatisfied with himself.
In the mid nineteenth century, the typical murderer was a drunken illiterate; a hundred years later the typical murderer regards himself as a thinking man.
― Colin Wilson Quotes
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
