Famous quotes

Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,158,269 quotes Who coined it · How we decide

English Italiano Polski עברית Français Português فارسی Español 中文 Русский Deutsch العربية हिन्दी 日本語 Ελληνικά Latina

Colin Wilson

181 quotes

“Now the basic impulse behind existentialism is optimistic, very much like the impulse behind all science. Existentialism is romanticism, and romanticism is the feeling that man is not the mere he has always taken himself for. Romanticism began as a tremendous surge of optimism about the stature of man. Its aim — like that of science — was to raise man above the muddled feelings and impulses of his everyday humanity, and to make him a god-like observer of human existence.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is the fallacy of all intellectuals to believe that intellect can grasp life. It cannot, because it works in terms of symbols and language. There is another factor involved: consciousness. If the flame of consciousness is low, a symbol has no power to evoke reality, and intellect is helpless.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But as I listened to him, I felt a touch of coldness inside of me, as if I had suddenly become aware of the eyes of some dangerous creature. It passed in a moment, but I found myself shuddering.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If space in infinite, how about the space inside man? Blake said that eternity opens from the center of an atom. My former terror vanished. Now I saw that I was mistaken in thinking of myself as an object in a dead landscape. I had been assuming that man is limited because his brain is limited, that only so much can be packed into the portmanteau. But the spaces of the mind are a new dimension. The body is a mere wall between two infinities. Space extends to infinity outwards; the mind stretches to infinity inwards.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The everyday world demands our attention, and prevents us from sinking into ourselves. As a romantic, I have always resented this: I like to sink into myself. The problems and anxieties of living make it difficult. Well, now I had an anxiety that referred to something inside of me, and it reminded me that my inner world was just as real and important as the world around me.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One gloomy and pessimistic writer with a powerful style affects a whole generation of writers, who in turn affect almost every educated person in the country.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have said that, in a sense, the parasites were a 'shadow' of man's cowardice and passivity. Their strength could increase in an atmosphere of defeat and panic, for it fed on human fear. In that case, the best way to combat them was to change the atmosphere to one of strength and purpose.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I had never doubted my own abilities, but I was quite prepared to believe that "the world" would decline to recognize them.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For me [fiction] is a manner of philosophizing ... Philosophy may be only a shadow of the reality it tries to grasp, but the novel is altogether more satisfactory. I am almost tempted to say that no philosopher is qualified to do his job unless he is also a novelist ... I would certainly exchange any of the works of Whitehead or Wittgenstein for the novels they ought to have written.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The characteristic of the really great writer is the ability of his mind to to suddenly leap beyond his ordinary human values, into sudden perception of universal values.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“These are the visionary, mystical moments, when a man 'completes his partial mind'. His everyday conscious self is only a small part of the mind, like the final crescent of the moon. In moments of crisis, the full moon suddenly appears.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sartre observed that he had never felt so free as during the German occupation when (as a member of the French resistance) he was in constant danger of being arrested and shot. Could there be a more conclusive proof that human beings are freer than they realize, and that their freedom is eroded by habit and laziness?”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Yet it must be acknowledged that there is a fundamental difference between the sexual impulse in men and women. Her need is for a lover, a protector, a father for her children. His desire is for mastery, conquest, to be allowed to use her body for his own satisfaction. He feels like a bee, burying itself in a flower, apparently doing nothing for the flower but taking its sweetness. If he loves her, then his desire is mixed with a kind of pity.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And in a flash I understood the meaning of sex. It is a craving for the 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 (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Pessimism is a leaden weight around the feet. Defeat is always self-chosen.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Maslow explained that, some time in the late thirties, he had been struck by the thought that modern psychology is based on the study of sick people. But since there are more healthy people around than sick people, how can this psychology give a fair idea of the workings of the human mind? It struck him that it might be worthwhile to devote some time to the study of healthy people.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The original Golden Dawn was not always as serious as it should have been. Mathers was a clown, and Yeats was just a romantic trying to deceive himself. Most of them were interested in personal power, and it ended up by destroying them. The aim of our group is the scientific exploration of the hidden powers of the human mind.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What so impressed me on that first reading was the self-containedness of Tolkien's world. I suppose there are a few novelists who have created worlds that are uniquely their own -- Faulkner, for example, or Dickens. But since their world is fairly close to the actual world, it cannot really be called a unique creation. The only parallel that occurs to me is the Wagner Ring cycle, that one can only enter as if taking a holiday on a strange planet.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are now living in an age of literary exhaustion; we get used to the bleak landscape. Cyril Connolly said that the writer's business is to produce masterpieces; but what masterpieces have been produced in the past fifty years?”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The evolutionary urge drives man to seek for intenser forms of fulfillment, since his basic urge is for more life, more consciousness, and this contentment has an air of stagnation that the healthy mind rejects. (This recognition lies at the centre of my own 'outsider theory': that there are human beings to whom comfort means nothing, but whose happiness consists in following an obscure inner-drive, an 'appetite for reality'.)”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All men are stuck in a kind of fog. They're surrounded by a wall of fog. They think this is perfectly normal, but it's not. It means that since they can't see much beyond their own little situation, they tend to vegetate. They need some immediate stimulus to keep them alert.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When I'm bored, my sense of values goes to sleep. But it's not dead, only asleep. A crisis can wake it up and make the world seem infinitely important and interesting. But what I need to learn is the trick of shaking them awake myself . . . And incidentally, another name for the sense of values is intelligence. A stupid person is a person whose values are narrow.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The mystical impulse in men is somehow a desire to possess the universe. In women, it's a desire to be possessed.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I began with a strong bias toward skepticism. Besides, to tell the truth, I still find occult phenomena a little preposterous and irrelevant. What do they really matter if you place them against the truly great human achievements — against the creative genius of a Michaelangelo, a Beethoven, an Einstein? In that context they seem almost trivial.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is clearly absurd to say that if you go on adding atoms together until they have fused into a complex molecule, that molecule will become capable of self-reproduction. It is like saying that a skyscraper is more capable of reproduction than a bungalow. And suppose life did come into being through some accidental interaction of molecules, sun and cosmic rays; why should it not be content to rest passively? Why should it have been possessed of a desire to persist and evolve?”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It seems that thought itself has a power for which it has never been given credit.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Suffering is admittedly one of the central problems of human existence; but this is because we have a suspicion that it is all for nothing. If we had a certainty about meaning, the suffering would be bearable. With no certainty of meaning, even comfort begins to feel futile.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“On the whole, the scientist is better off if he collects his facts by accident, little by little, so he can study them before he tries to fit them into a jigsaw puzzle, This is how the late Tom Lethbridge came to arrive at his theories about other dimensions of reality. It is also how Guy Lyon Playfair came to develop his own theories about the nature of the poltergeist.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In reading Jung's account of his cases, it is impossible not to be aware that his success was due partly to an element of ruthlessness; he was dominated by curiosity rather than compassion.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Jung fiercely resented the implication that he was a hypocritical, self-seeking Judas, a 'rat'. Yet there was just enough truth in it to strike home. He was undoubtedly a man who liked his own way, no matter what the cost to others.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Jung believed that alchemy is about the transmutation of the mind and the discovery of the self. Inevitably, he saw the male and female elements of the prima materia -- the king and queen of alchemy -- as the animus and anima; this seemed to indicate the (sic) alchemy is about psychological processes.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Jung believed that he was proceeding scientifically, but most Freudians remain convinced that he was inventing his own underground realm, rather as Tolkien invented Middle Earth. There is at least an element of truth in this view.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Upper middle-class upbringing has rooted out any element of what might appear to be self-assertion or egoism; good manners is to be like everyone else. So the male of the species becomes accustomed to suppress any stirring of impatience or originality. Shaw once said you can't learn to skate without making a fool of yourself; the British middle-class attitude seems to be that, in that case, you hadn't better skate at all. The result seems to be considerably more oppressive than being brought up in a Jewish ghetto or a west side slum.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) first seen 1976 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 112, An integrity born of hope: Notes on Christopher Isherwood (1976)
“One of the major problems of our society is that so many people are too intelligent to accept religion, but not intelligent or strong-minded enough to look for acceptable alternatives; in the same way, many people are strong-minded enough not to want to be 'organization men', but incapable of seeing beyond an act of protest. These situations produce a sense of being 'between two stools', lacking real motive; a sense of mental strain is produced that may find its outlet in violence, or in organised anti-social behaviour.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 224, Crimes of Freedom -- and their cure (1964)
“The fundamental tenet of Steiner's teaching is that if we take the trouble to recognize the independent existence of the inner worlds of thought, and keep the mind turned in that direction, we shall soon become increasingly conscious of their reality. We are not, as Sartre believed, stranded in the universe of matter like a whale on a beach. That inner world is our natural home. Moreover, once we grasp this truth, we can also recognize that we ourselves possess an "essential ego," a "true self," a fundamental identity that goes far beyond our usual feeble sense of being "me.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The rather more dubious side of Nietzsche's 'evolutionism' is his glorification of the warrior -- particularly when, as an exemplification of the warrior-hero, he chooses an archetypal 'spoilt brat' like Cesare Borgia. Nietzsche's own physical weakness and consequent inability to escape the atmosphere of the study leads him to take a rather unrealistic view of the man of action.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And the central assertion of his philosophy is that this inner realm is the 'spiritual world' and that once man has learned to enter this realm, he realizes that it is not a mere imaginative reflection of the external world, but a world that possesses its own independent reality.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For Jung, the 'psychic world' (i.e. the world of the mind) was an independent reality, and it was possible to travel there and make the acquaintance of its inhabitants.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He was a man born into a world dominated by scientific materialism. His objection to this materialism was not merely intellectual, or even egotistical (the feeling 'If the world is wholly material, then I can't be very important'). It was the feeling that man is cut off from his inner powers by this superficial attitude.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Steiner goes further than this -- and this is his own central contribution to modern thought. He states that once we have made a habit of remembering Mozart and the stars, we shall find ourselves developing powers of 'spiritual vision.' We shall never again feel ourselves to be helpless victims of the external world.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The case is a good example of what Van Vogt came to call "the violent man" or the "Right Man." He is a man driven by a manic need for self-esteem — to feel that he is a "somebody." He is obsessed by the question of "losing face," so will never, under any circumstances, admit that he might be in the wrong.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The purpose of consciousness is to illuminate the world. If we try to run consciousness at half its proper voltage, the result will be a "devalued" world. But that is not the fault of the world; it is our fault. Low-voltage consciousness shows us less of the world than high-voltage consciousness, just as we would see an art gallery less clearly by candlelight than by sunlight.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The key to understanding Crowley is the same as the key to understanding the Marquis de Sade. Both wasted an immense amount of energy screaming defiance at the authority they resented so much, and lacked the insight to see that they were shaking their fists at an abstraction.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The main problem for the average reader -- particularly of The Great Beast -- is that Crowley seems such an intolerable show-off that it is hard to believe anything he says.”
Colin Wilson (1931–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source