Colin Wilson Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“Life itself is an exile. The way home is not the way back.”
-- Colin WilsonSource : Colin Wilson (1982). “The Outsider”, Tarcher
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“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.”
-- Colin WilsonSource : Colin Wilson (1985). “The essential Colin Wilson”
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“The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain.”
-- Colin WilsonSource : "Another Kind of Life; Victorian Giants review - birth of the outsider" by Sean O'Hagan, www.theguardian.com. March 11, 2018.
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“I've always believed that a writer has got to remain an outsider.”
-- Colin WilsonSource : Interview with Paul Newman, Abraxas Unbound #7,
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“As a young man I was scornful about the supernatural but as I have got older, the sharp line that divided the credible from the incredible has tended to blur; I am aware that the whole world is slightly incredible”
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“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.”
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“The worst crimes are not committed by evil degenerates, but by decent and intelligent people taking 'pragmatic' decisions.”
-- Colin Wilson -
“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.”
-- Colin Wilson -
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“Ask the Outsider what he ultimately wants,and he will admit he doesn't know.Why? Because he wants it instinctively,and it is not always possible to tell what your instincts are driving towards.”
-- Colin WilsonSource : Colin Wilson (1982). “The Outsider”, Tarcher
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“Imagination should be used, not to escape reality but to create it.”
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“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”
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“When I open my eyes in the morning, I am not confronted by a world, but by a million possible worlds.”
-- Colin Wilson -
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“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 WilsonSource : Colin Wilson (1971). “The Occult: A History”, Vintage
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“Turning on the light is easy if you know where the switch is.”
-- Colin Wilson -
“The mystical impulse in men is somehow a desire to possess the universe. In women, it's a desire to be possessed.”
-- Colin WilsonSource : "The Black Room". Book by Colin Wilson, p. 108, 1971.
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“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.”
-- Colin WilsonSource : Colin Wilson (1988). “The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders”
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“I had never doubted my own abilities, but I was quite prepared to believe that "the world" would decline to recognize them.”
-- Colin WilsonSource : Colin Wilson (2014). “The Outsider”, p.13, Diversion Books
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“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.”
-- Colin Wilson -
“If you asked me what is the basis of all my work, it's the feeling there's something basically wrong with human beings.”
-- Colin Wilson -
“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 WilsonSource : Colin Wilson (2014). “The Outsider”, p.194, Diversion Books
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“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.”
-- Colin WilsonSource : "The Origins of the Sexual Impulse" by Colin Wilson, (p. 75), 1963.
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“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.”
-- Colin Wilson -
“Man is the only animal who is prone to insanity.”
-- Colin WilsonSource : Colin Wilson (1983). “Access to inner worlds: the story of Brad Absetz”, Rider & Co
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“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.”
-- Colin Wilson -
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“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.”
-- Colin WilsonSource : "The Outsider". Book by Colin Wilson, p. 231, 1956.
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“Too much success gets you resting on your laurels and creates a kind of quicksand that you can't get out of.”
-- Colin Wilson -
“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.”
-- Colin WilsonSource : Colin Wilson (1971). “The Occult: A History”, Vintage
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