Top 64 Colin Wilson Quotes
#1. 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 Wilson
#2. 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.
Colin Wilson
#3. 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
#4. The mind has exactly the same power as the hands; not merely to grasp the world, but to change it.
Colin Wilson
#5. 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
#6. A tired man is already in the grip of death and insanity ... A sane man is a man who is fully awake. As he grows tired, he loses his ability to rise above dreams and delusions, and life becomes steadily more chaotic.
Colin Wilson
#7. 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
#8. 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 Wilson
#9. 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.
Colin Wilson
#10. 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
#11. 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.
Colin Wilson
#12. Life itself is an exile. The way home is not the way back.
Colin Wilson
#13. She admitted that his nerves were ragged. 'But why?' asked Reich. Surely things were going excellently for the company. 'Oh yes,' she said. 'But when a man is President of a concern as big as A.I.U., he gets into the habit of worrying, and sometimes can't stop.
Colin Wilson
#14. The self-surmounter can never put up with the man who has ceased to be dissatisfied with himself.
Colin Wilson
#15. Man is the only animal who is prone to insanity.
Colin Wilson
#16. 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 Wilson
#17. 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
#18. What I wanted to do was to try to create a philosophy upon a completely new foundation.
Colin Wilson
#19. The cultural problem was 'the fallacy of insignificance', and it was a philosophical form of this fallacy that had somehow landed existentialism in a cul de sac.
Colin Wilson
#20. The mystical impulse in men is somehow a desire to possess the universe. In women, it's a desire to be possessed.
Colin Wilson
#21. When I was a teenager I was a total romantic escapist. My world was books.
Colin Wilson
#22. Man is a continent, but his conscious mind is no larger than a back garden ... man consists almost entirely of unrealized potentials.
Colin Wilson
#23. Imagination should be used, not to escape reality but to create it.
Colin Wilson
#24. The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain.
Colin Wilson
#25. 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
Colin Wilson
#26. 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?
Colin Wilson
#27. 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
#28. I had never doubted my own abilities, but I was quite prepared to believe that "the world" would decline to recognize them.
Colin Wilson
#29. 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.
Colin Wilson
#30. Modern man has the possibility of understanding the mechanism of consciousness, and marching directly towards his objective, with the will flexed to its maximum efficiency.
Colin Wilson
#31. The body will destroy the germs of a physical illness within a week; but the mind will preserve germs of morbidity or fear for a lifetime.
Colin Wilson
#32. The "passion for incredulity" can produce as much self-deception as the uncritical will to believe.
Colin Wilson
#33. Our language has become a tired and inefficient thing in the hands of journalists and writers who have nothing to say.
Colin Wilson
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. With the use of a map, I could walk from Paris to Calcutta; without a map, I might find myself in Odessa. Well, if we had a similar 'map' of the human mind, a man could explore all the territory that lies between death and mystical vision, between catatonia and genius.
Colin Wilson
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. Whereas in the past optimism had been regarded as rather shallow - because 'oh well, it's just your temperament, you happen to be just a cheerful sort of person' - what I wanted to do was to establish that in fact it is the pessimists who are allowing all kinds of errors to creep into their work.
Colin Wilson
#43. Turning on the light is easy if you know where the switch is.
Colin Wilson
#44. 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
#45. The visionary disciplines himself to see the world always as if he had only just seen it for the first time.
Colin Wilson
#46. I'm basically a writer of ideas, and the English aren't interested in ideas. The English, I'm afraid, are totally brainless.
Colin Wilson
#47. A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.
Colin Wilson
#48. Mind is not really 'inside' us in the same sense that our intestines are. Our individuality is a kind of eddy in the sea of mind, a reflection of the total identity of the universal humanity.
Colin Wilson
#50. 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
#51. When I open my eyes in the morning, I am not confronted by a world, but by a million possible worlds.
Colin Wilson
#52. The worst crimes are not committed by evil degenerates, but by decent and intelligent people taking 'pragmatic' decisions.
Colin Wilson
#53. Could it be that sexual perversion and romanticism sprang from the same longing for distant horizons?
Colin Wilson
#54. 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.
Colin Wilson
#55. What if the 'brutal thunderclap of halt' takes the form of the choice, Dishonesty or insanity?
Colin Wilson
#56. Too much success gets you resting on your laurels and creates a kind of quicksand that you can't get out of.
Colin Wilson
#57. It was Rousseau who was largely responsible for the problem by giving currency to the idea that freedom can exist without responsibility and discipline.
Colin Wilson
#58. 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
#59. I've always believed that a writer has got to remain an outsider.
Colin Wilson
#60. 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.
Colin Wilson
#61. If I'd stayed on in London and carried on going to literary parties, it would have wrecked me as a writer.
Colin Wilson
#62. And in a flash I understood the meaning of sex. It is a craving of mingling of consciousness, whose symbol is the mingling of bodies. Every time a man and a woman slake their thirst in the strange waters of the other's identity, they glimpse the immensity of their freedom.
Colin Wilson
#63. 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
#64. I've always been a pretty hard worker. That's how I've written over a hundred books.
Colin Wilson
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