Colin Wilson > Quotes

“Life itself is an exile. The way home is not the way back.”
― Colin Wilson

“The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain.”
― Colin Wilson

“I've always believed that a writer has got to remain an outsider.”
― Colin Wilson

“Imagination should be used, not to escape reality, but to create it.”
― 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 Wilson, The Outsider

“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 Wilson, The Outsider

“The worst crimes are not committed by evil degenerates, but by decent and intelligent people taking 'pragmatic' decisions.”
― Colin Wilson, A Criminal History of Mankind

“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”
― 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 Wilson, The Occult

“These men are in prison: that is the Outsider’s verdict. They are quite contented in prison—caged animals who have never known freedom; but it is prison all the same. And the Outsider? He is in prison too: nearly every Outsider in this book has told us so in a different language; but he knows it. His desire is to escape. But a prison-break is not an easy matter; you must know all about your prison, otherwise you might spend years in tunnelling, like the Abbe in The Count of Monte Cristo, and only find yourself in the next cell.”
― Colin Wilson, The Outsider

“Human beings do not realise the extent to which their own sense of defeat prevents them from doing things they could do perfectly well.”
― Colin Wilson

“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 Wilson, A Criminal History of Mankind

“إن الرواية أولاً وقبل كل شئ ليس الغرض منها تقديم المتعة للقارئ فحسب، بل إنها وسيلة تساعد الكاتب على هضم تجربته.”
― Colin Wilson, فن الرواية

“Man is not a 'fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant'. He changed drastically when he developed 'divided consciousness' to cope with complexities of civilisation, and has been changing steadily ever since. His greatest problem, the problem that has caused most of his agonies and miseries, has been his attempt to compensate for the narrowing of cinsciousness and the entrapment in the left-brain ego. His favorite method of compensation has been to seek out excitement. He feels most free in moments of conquest; so for the past three thousand years or so, most of the greatest man have led armies into their neighbours' territority, and turned order into chaos. This has plainly been a retrogressive step; the evolutionary urge has been defeating its own purpose.”
― Colin Wilson, A Criminal History of Mankind

“Some are perfectly satisfied with what they have; they eat, drink, impregnate their wives, and take life as it comes. Others can never forget that they are being cheated; that life tempts them to struggle by offering them the essence of sex, of beauty, of success; and that she always seems to pay in counterfeit money.”
― Colin Wilson, The Outsider

“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, A Criminal History of Mankind

“الفن مرآة يرى فيها المرء وجهه هو.”
― Colin Wilson, فن الرواية

“The Outsider is always unhappy, but he is the agent that ensures happiness for millions of ‘Insiders’.”
― Colin Wilson, The Outsider

“Our language has become a tired and inefficient thing in the hands of journalists and writers who have nothing to say.”
― Colin Wilson, The Occult

“Human intelligence is a function of man’s evolutionary urge; the scientist and the philosopher hunger for truth because they are tired of being merely human.”
― Colin Wilson, The Mind Parasites

“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.”
― Colin Wilson, A Criminal History of Mankind

“Faculty X is simply that latent power in human beings possess to reach beyond the present. After all, we know perfectly well that the past is as real as the present, and that New York and Singapore and Lhasa and Stepney Green are all as real as the place I happen to be in at the moment. Yet my senses do not agree. They assure me that this place, here and now, is far more real than any other place or any other time. Only in certain moments of great inner intensity do I know this to be a lie. Faculty X is a sense of reality, the 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”
― Colin Wilson, The Occult

“Everyone is familiar with the phenomenon of feeling more or less alive on different days. Everyone knows on any given day that there are energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not call forth, but which he might display if these were greater. Most of us feel as if a sort of cloud weighed upon us, keeping us below our highest notch of clearness in discernment, sureness in reasoning, or firmness in deciding. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources. In some persons this sense of being cut off from their rightful resources is extreme, and we then get the formidable neurasthenic and psychasthenic conditions, with life grown into one tissue of impossibilities, that so many medical books describe.

Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives far within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use. He energizes below his maximum, and he behaves below his optimum. In elementary faculty, in co-ordination, in power of inhibition and co ntro l, in every conceivable way, his life is contracted like the field of vision of an hysteric subject — but with less excuse, for the poor hysteric is diseased, while in the rest of us, it is only an inveterate habit — the habit of inferiority to our full self — that is bad.”
― Colin Wilson, G.I. Gurdjieff: The War Against Sleep

“- الحيا ة منفى بحد ذاتها. العودة الى البيت ليس هو طريق الرجعة.”
― Colin Wilson, The Outsider

“One of man's deepest habits is keeping alert for dangers and difficulties, refusing to allow himself to explore his own mind because he daren't take his eyes off the world around him.”
― Colin Wilson, The Mind Parasites: The Supernatural Metaphysical Cult Thriller

“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.”
― Colin Wilson, Mysteries

“There is in Shaw, as in Gurdjieff and Nietzsche, a recognition of the immense effort of Will that is necessary to express even a little freedom, that places them beside Pascal and St. Augustine as religious thinkers. Their view is saved from pessimism only by its mystical recognition of the possibilities of pure Will, freed from the entanglements of automatism”
― Colin Wilson, The Outsider

“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.”
― Colin Wilson, The Occult

“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.”
― Colin Wilson, Religion and the Rebel

“Man is an animal who is trying to evolve into a god. Many of his problems are an inevitable result of this struggle.”
― Colin Wilson