Colin Wilson Quotes

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All quotes by Colin Wilson: Consciousness Feelings Vision more...
  • 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 Encyclopedia of Modern Murder 1962-1983" by Colin Wilson, "Introductory Essay", (p. xx), 1983.
  • The self-surmounter can never put up with the man who has ceased to be dissatisfied with himself.

    Men  
    Colin Wilson (2014). “The Outsider”, p.169, Diversion Books
  • The visionary disciplines himself to see the world always as if he had only just seen it for the first time.

    Colin Wilson (1985). “The essential Colin Wilson”
  • 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.

    Colin Wilson (1971). “The Occult: A History”, Vintage
  • The worst crimes are not committed by evil degenerates, but by decent and intelligent people taking 'pragmatic' decisions.

  • 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.

    Men  
    Colin Wilson (2014). “The Outsider”, p.191, Diversion Books
  • 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.

  • 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.

    "The Outsider". Book by Colin Wilson, p. 231, 1956.
  • Our language has become a tired and inefficient thing in the hands of journalists and writers who have nothing to say.

    Colin Wilson (2014). “The Outsider”, p.194, Diversion Books
  • I'm basically a writer of ideas, and the English aren't interested in ideas. The English, I'm afraid, are totally brainless.

  • When I open my eyes in the morning, I am not confronted by a world, but by a million possible worlds.

  • Isaiah Berlin once said that there are two kinds of writers, hedgehogs and foxes. He said the fox knows many things, the hedgehog knows just one thing. So Shakespeare is a typical fox; Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky are typical hedgehogs. Now, I'm a typical hedgehog. I know just one thing, and I repeat it over and over again. I try to approach it from different angles to make it look different, but it's the same thing.

  • The Americans have always been more open to my ideas. In fact, I could earn a living in America just by lecturing. One of my brightest audiences, incidentally, were the prisoners in a Philadelphia gaol - brighter than my students at university.

    Interview with Paul Newman, Abraxas Unbound #7,
  • The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain.

    Men  
    "Another Kind of Life; Victorian Giants review - birth of the outsider" by Sean O'Hagan, www.theguardian.com. March 11, 2018.
  • 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.

    Colin Wilson (2014). “The Outsider”, p.194, Diversion Books
  • Could it be that sexual perversion and romanticism sprang from the same longing for distant horizons?

    Colin Wilson (1988). “The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders”
  • 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

  • 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.

    Men  
    "Religion and the Rebel". Book by Colin Wilson, p. 309, 1957.
  • Imagination should be used, not to escape reality but to create it.

  • 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.

  • 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.

    Colin Wilson (2014). “The Outsider”, p.370, Diversion Books
  • 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.

    "Mysteries". Book by Colin Wilson, 1978.
  • I've always believed that a writer has got to remain an outsider.

    Interview with Paul Newman, Abraxas Unbound #7,
  • Turning on the light is easy if you know where the switch is.

  • 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.

    Men  
    Colin Wilson (1985). “The essential Colin Wilson”
  • The mystical impulse in men is somehow a desire to possess the universe. In women, it's a desire to be possessed.

    Men  
    "The Black Room". Book by Colin Wilson, p. 108, 1971.
  • Man is brilliant at solving problems; but solving them only makes him the victim of his own childishness and laziness. It is this recognition that has made almost every major philosopher in history a pessimist.

    Men  
  • The "passion for incredulity" can produce as much self-deception as the uncritical will to believe.

    Colin Wilson (2011). “Afterlife: An Investigation”, p.307, Doubleday
  • I had never doubted my own abilities, but I was quite prepared to believe that "the world" would decline to recognize them.

    Colin Wilson (2014). “The Outsider”, p.13, Diversion Books
  • It seemed perfectly possible that, in spite of my certainty of my own genius, I might die of some illness, or perhaps even in a street accident, before I had ever glimpsed the meaning of life. My moods of happiness and self-confidence convinced me that I had a "destiny" to become a famous writer, and to be remembered as one of the most important thinkers of the century.

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    Colin Wilson quotes about: Consciousness Feelings Vision