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Colin Wilson

181 quotes

“I've always believed that a writer has got to remain an outsider. If I was offered anything like the Nobel Prize for Literature, I'd find it an extremely difficult conflict because I'd be basically disinclined to accept.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No art can be judged by purely aesthetic standards, although a painting or a piece of music may appear to give a purely aesthetic pleasure. Aesthetic enjoyment is an intensification of the vital response, and this response forms the basis of all value judgements. The existentialist contends that all values are connected with the problems of human existence, the stature of man, the purpose of life. These values are inherent in all works of art, in addition to their aesthetic values, and are closely connected with them.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Chicago Review (Volume 13, no. 2, 1959, p. 152-181)
“The Outsider’s case against society is very clear. All men and women have these dangerous, unnamable impulses, yet they keep up a pretense, to themselves, to others; their respectability, their philosophy, their religion, are all attempts to gloss over, to make civilized and rational something that is savage, unorganized, irrational. He is an Outsider because he stands for truth.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There certainly is self division. The man who watches a woman undressing has the red eyes of an ape; yet the man who sees two young lovers, really alone for the first time, who brings out all the pathos, the tenderness and uncertainty when he tells about it, is no brute; he is very much human. And the ape and the man exist in one body; and when the ape's desires are about to be fulfilled, he disappears and is succeeded by the man, who is disgusted with the ape's appetite.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Outsider may be an artist, but the artist is not necessarily an Outsider.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What can characterize the Outsider is a sense of strangeness, or unreality.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Barbusse has shown us that the Outsider is a man who cannot live in the comfortable, insulated world of the bourgeois, accepting what he sees and touches as reality.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Art is thought, and thought only gives the world an appearance of order to anyone weak enough to be convinced by its show.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He alone is aware of the truth, and if all men were aware of it, there would be an end of life. In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. But his kingship is kingship over nothing. It brings no powers and privileges, only loss of faith and exhaustion of the power to act. Its world is a world without values.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Man is as much a slave to his immediate surroundings now as he was when he lived in tree-huts. Give him the highest, the most exciting thoughts about man's place in the universe, the meaning of history; they can all be snuffed out in a moment if he wants his dinner, or feels irritated by a child squalling on a bus. He is bound by pettiness.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Outsider has his proper place in the Order of Society, as the impractical dreamer.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In refusing to face evil, Sinclair has gained nothing and lost a great deal; the Buddhist scripture expenses it: those who refuse to discriminate might as well be dead.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is not enough to accept a concept of order and live by it; that is cowardice, and such cowardice cannot result from freedom. Chaos must be faced. Real order must be preceded by a descent into chaos.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The outsider, Haller says, is a self-divided man; being self-divided, his chief desire is to be unified. He is selfish as a man with a lifelong raging toothache.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The vitality of the ordinary members of society is dependent on its Outsiders.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...the Outsider's problem is the problem of denial of self-expression.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Outsider cannot accept life as it is, who cannot consider his own existence or anyone else's necessary. He sees 'too deep and too much'. It is still a question of self-expression.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Outsider's miseries are the prophet's teething pains. He retreats into his room, like a spider in a dark corner; he lives alone, wishes to avoid people.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This is the Outsider's extremity. He does not prefer not to believe; he doesn't like feeling that futility gets the last word in the universe; his human nature would like to find something it can answer to with complete assent. But honesty prevents his accepting a solution that he cannot reason about.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“These men traveling down to the City in the morning, reading their newspapers or staring at advertisements above the opposite seats, they have no doubt of who they are. Inscribe on the placard in place of the advertisement for corn-plasters, Elliot's lines: We are the hollow men”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Normally man’s mind is composed only of a consciousness of his immediate needs, which is to say that this consciousness at any moment can be defined as ‘’his awareness of his own power to satisfy those needs.’’ He thinks in terms of what he intends to do in half an hour’s time, a day’s time, a month’s time an no more. He never asks himself: what are the ‘’limits’’ of my powers? In a sense, he is like a man who has a fortune is the bank, who never asks himself, How much money have I got, but only, Have I enough for a pound of cheese, a new tie, etc.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Behind man lies the abyss, nothingness; the Outsider knows this; it is his business to sink claws of iron into life to grasp it tighter than the indifferent bourgeois, to build, to Will, in spite of the abyss.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Outsider is always unhappy, but he is an agent that ensures the happiness for millions of 'Insiders'.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The unbeliever walks for a quadrillion miles, yet one moments of reality makes up for it.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Outsider wants to cease to be an Outsider. He wants to be ‘balanced'. He would like to achieve a vividness of sense-perception (Lawrence, Van Gogh, Hemingway) He would also like to understand the human soul and its working and, be ‘possessed’ by a Will topower, to more life. (Barbusse and Mitya Karamazov) He would like to escape triviality forever. Above all, he would like to know how to express himself because that is the means by which he can get to know himself and hi unknown possibilities.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Self-expression is impossible in relation with other men; their self-expression interferes with it. The greatest heights of self-expression in poetry, music, painting – are achieved by men who are supremely alone.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Most men have nothing in their heads but their physical needs; put them on a desert island with nothing to occupy their minds and they would go insane. They lack real motive. The curse of civilization is boredom.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 men who love living.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In most men, the conscious and the unconscious being hardly ever make contact; consequently the conscious aim is to make himself as comfortable as possible with as little effort as possible. But there are other men, whom we have been calling, for convenience, ‘Outsiders’, whose conscious and unconscious being keep in closer contact, and the conscious mind is forever aware of the urge to care about ‘more abundant life’, and care less about comfort and stability and the rest of the notions that are so dear to the bourgeois.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Humanism is only another name for spiritual laziness, or a vague half-creed adopted by men of science and logicians whose heads are too occupied with the world of mathematics and physics to worry about religious categories.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The individual begins that long effort as an Outsider; he may finish it as a saint.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Cézanne's painting is strictly painting, and its value is immense; but Van Gogh's painting has the Outsider's characteristic: it is a laboratory refuse of a man who treated his own life as an experiment in living; it faithfully records moods and developments of vision on the manner of a Bildungsroman.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Diary of Vaslav Nijinjsky reaches a limit of sincerity beyond any of the documents that we have referred to on this study. There are other modern works that express the same sense that civilized life is a form of living death; notably the poetry of T. S. Eliot and the novels of Franz Kafka; but there is an element of prophetic denunciation in both, the attitude of healthy men rebuking their sick neighbors. We possess no other record of the Outsider's problems that was written by a man about to be defeated and permanently smashed by those problems.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The self-surmounter can never put up with the man who has ceased to be dissatisfied with himself.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nietzsche's great concept of Yea-saying gave him a notion of purpose that is seen as positive. Nietzsche, in short, was a religious mystic.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It may seem to be a long way from Blake's innocent talk of love and copulation to De Sade's need to inflict pain. And yet both are the outcome of a sexual mysticism that strives to transcend the everyday world. Simone de Beauvoir said penetratingly of De Sade's work that 'he is trying to communicate an experience whose distinguishing characteristic is, nevertheless its will to remain incommunicable'. De Sade's perversion may have sprung from his dislike of his mother or of other women, but its basis is a kind of distorted religious emotion.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sadism is plainly connected with the need for self-assertion. At the same time it cannot be separated from the idea of defeat. A sadist is a man, who, in some sense, has his back to the wall. Nothing is further from sadism, for example, than the cheerful, optimistic mentality of a Shaw or Wells.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The history of the Romanovs is an Elizabethan tragedy that lasts for three centuries. Its keynote is cruelty, a barbaric, pointless kind of cruelty that has always been common in the East, but that came to Europe only recently, in the time of Hitler.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The point I wish to make is that I became aware that we discipline our minds to see only certain aspects of the world; life is complicated, and we need all our wits about us to deal with its complexities. There would be no great point in having second sight or thaumaturgic powers for most of us. But it is worth observing that they can generally be developed where needed.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You've got the temperament of a scholar, and you live on your own and write books. You don't have anything to do with civilization. You've been in London a few days and you can't wait to get back home. But how about the people who can't write books -- people there's no outlet for in this civilization? What about your new men who don't know what to do?”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Husserl has shown that man's prejudices go a great deal deeper than his intellect or his emotions. Consciousness itself is 'prejudiced' — that is to say, intentional.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A child might be overawed by a great city, but a civil engineer knows that he might demolish it and rebuild it himself. Husserl's philosophy has the same aim: to show us that, although we may have been thrust into this world without a 'by your leave,' we are mistaken to assume that it exists independently of us. It is true that reality exists apart from us; but what we mistake for the world is actually a world constituted by us, selected from an infinitely complex reality.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The effects of mescalin or LSD can be, in some respects, far more satisfying than those of alcohol. To begin with, they last longer; they also leave behind no hangover, and leave the mental faculties clear and unimpaired. They stimulate the faculties and produce the ideal ground for a peak experience.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source