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Colin Wilson Quotes (1931-2013)
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About Colin Wilson
Colin Henry Wilson (26 June 1931 – 5 December 2013) was a British writer, known for his first book The Outsider and over one hundred other books, including seventeen novels and many works in criminology, existential philosophy, psychology, religion, the occult, mysticism, wine, and music.
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“...the Outsider's problem is the problem of denial of self-expression.”
“What can characterize the Outsider is a sense of strangeness, or unreality.”
“Pessimism is a leaden weight around the feet. Defeat is always self-chosen.”
“The Outsider may be an artist, but the artist is not necessarily an Outsider.”
“The individual begins that long effort as an Outsider; he may finish it as a saint.”
“The Outsider has his proper place in the Order of Society, as the impractical dreamer.”
“The unbeliever walks for a quadrillion miles, yet one moments of reality makes up for it.”
“The "passion for incredulity" can produce as much self-deception as the uncritical will to believe.”
“Could it be that sexual perversion and romanticism sprang from the same longing for distant horizons?”
“The self-surmounter can never put up with the man who has ceased to be dissatisfied with himself.”
“Art is thought, and thought only gives the world an appearance of order to anyone weak enough to be convinced by its show.”
“It was Rousseau who was largely responsible for the problem by giving currency to the idea that freedom can exist without responsibility and discipline.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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 Quotes by Topic
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Colin Wilson on Superstition 3 quotes
“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 on Spiritism 2 quotes
“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 on Value (ethics) 2 quotes
“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.”
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Colin Wilson on Unidentified flying object 2 quotes
“These left me in no doubt that something was trying to communicate with us, but that direct communication would be counterproductive. It seemed to be an important part of the scheme to create a sense of mystery.”
Colin Wilson on Crisis 2 quotes
“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 on Optimism 2 quotes
“Now the basic impulse behind existentialism is optimistic, very much like the impulse behind all science... 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”
Colin Wilson on Romanticism 2 quotes
“[R]omanticism 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 on Boredom 2 quotes
“Once we can see how this question of freedom of the will has been vitiated by post-romantic philosophy, with its inbuilt tendency to laziness and boredom, we can also see how it came about that existentialism found itself in a hole of its own digging, and how the philosophical developments since then have amounted to walking in circles round that hole.”
Colin Wilson on Existentialism 2 quotes
“Once we can see how this question of freedom of the will has been vitiated by post-romantic philosophy, with its inbuilt tendency to laziness and boredom, we can also see how it came about that existentialism found itself in a hole of its own digging, and how the philosophical developments since then have amounted to walking in circles round that hole.”
Colin Wilson on Meaning of life 2 quotes
“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 us as human beings.”
Colin Wilson on Teenagers 2 quotes
“When I was in my teens, I invented a term to describe them. I call it 'holiday consciousness' . . . because I often experienced this sense of optimism and wide-awakeness when setting out on a journey or a holiday. It was always the feeling that the world is self-evidently complex and beautiful, and that life is so obviously good that man's boredom and defeat is an absurdity . . . And then I used to ask: Why do mean forget this so easily? And the answer seemed obvious: because the human will is so flabby and weak. Instead of being self-controlled, self-driven creatures, most men are little more than leaves on a stream, they drift along hoping for the best. I once wrote that men are like grandfather clocks driven by watchsprings.”
What Colin Wilson Said About Others
Discover personal opinions Colin Wilson shared regarding contemporaries.
Colin Wilson on Friedrich Nietzsche 4 quotes
“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 on Carl Jung 2 quotes
“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 on Edmund Husserl 2 quotes
“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 on Uri Geller 2 quotes
“The things that always seem to work are the things that any magician can duplicate. Randi's quite right to point that out. But that's not because I'm doing a conjuring trick. You'd think that whatever causes these things to happen doesn't want them to be proved.”
Colin Wilson on Aleister Crowley 2 quotes
“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 as at abstraction.”
Colin Wilson on Marquis de Sade 2 quotes
“This in turn suggests an answer to our question: what happened between the birth of De Sade and the birth of Krafft-Ebbing? The rise of the novel taught Europe to use its imagination. And when imagination was applied to sex, the result was the rise of pornography -- and of "sexual perversion."”
Colin Wilson on H. P. Lovecraft 2 quotes
“I suppose what makes Lovecraft both good and bad is the fact that he was an obsessed writer. And this is also the reason that so few of the works in the Lovecraft tradition have touched the same level of imaginative power. August Derleth or Robert Bloch can capture the Arkham atmosphere and style excellently, but it doesn't express their true centre of gravity as writers. [...] This explains why Lovecraft has remained unique, in spite of the number of writers who have been fascinated by his mythical world and by his style. He created the Cthulhu Mythos out of inner necessity.”
Colin Wilson on Abraham Maslow 2 quotes
“Maslow's psychology, firmly based upon Freud and Watson, simply points out that the optimistic side of the picture has been overlooked; the deterministic laws of our 'lower nature' hold sway in their won field; but there are other laws. Man's freedom is a reality -- a reality that makes a difference to his physical, as well as his mental health. When Frank's prisoners ceased to believe in the possibility of freedom, they grew sick and died. On the other hand, when they saw that Dachau had no chimney, standing out all night in the rain seemed no great hardship; they laughed and joked. The conclusion needs to be stated in letters ten feet high. In order to realise his possibilities, man must believe in an open future; he must have a vision of something worth doing. And this will not be possible until all the determinism and pessimism that we have inherited from the 19th century -- and which has infected every department of our culture, from poetry to atomic physics -- has been dismissed as fallacious and illogical. Twentieth century science, philosophy, politics, literature -- even music -- has been constructed upon a weltanschauung that leaves half of human nature out of account.”
Colin Wilson on Cesare Borgia
“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.”
Colin Wilson on Cyril Connolly
“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 on Peter I of Russia
“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 on Zoroaster
Quotes About Colin Wilson
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Sarah Bakewell on Colin Wilson
“The Outsider is certainly an eccentric book, revealing hasty and partial readings of its sources. Yet it has flair and conviction, and it had a deep impact on many readers — especially on those who, like Wilson himself, lacked the privileges of a canonical education but were intelligent and newly confident, eager to explore cultural ideas and to question the world. It was a book about outsiders for outsiders.”
Cyril Connolly on Colin Wilson
“Mr. Wilson does not write as one who believes in a particular religion but rather as an intellectual who is being forced more and more into accepting religion as the only solution to the problem of the Outsider. In other words, the anxiety and uneasiness, the sheer horror of being oneself in the modern world is not to be cured by reason or even of study of philosophies which set out to explain them, like Existentialism; the unpleasant symptoms have to be lived through, leading to the worst, in order that the final, mystical experience may be attained. The Outsider has it within him to become a saint. Yet, though Mr. Wilson is drawn to religion, and all his arrows point that way, he never departs from his standards of intellectual analysis.”
Howard F. Dossor on Colin Wilson
“Wilson constitutes one of the most significant challenges to twentieth-century critics. It seems most likely that critics analysing his work in the middle of the twenty-first century, will be puzzled that his contemporaries paid such inadequate attention to him. But it is not merely for their sake that he should be examined. Critics who turn to him will find themselves involved in the central questions of our age and will be in touch with a mind that has disclosed an extraordinary resilience in addressing them.”
Martin Gardner on Colin Wilson
“Colin bought it all. With unparalleled egotism and scientific ignorance he believed almost everything he read about the paranormal, no matter how outrageous. Nothing by believers escaped his notice, nothing by skeptics held his attention. The Occult, he once told me, outsold all his previous books put together.”
Nicolas Tredel on Colin Wilson
“The twenty-first century may look back on Colin Wilson as one of the novelists who foresaw the future of fiction, and something, perhaps, of the future of man.”
Raymond Williams on Colin Wilson 2 quotes
“The experience of the outsider (the feeling of separation, isolation, and personal or social frustration) is, of course, not rare, as Mr Wilson claims, but common, and even, in certain situations, normal. The resulting detachment will often produce valuable perceptions of the general life that is being observed. But, on communication, these perceptions will, quite properly, have to undergo the scrutiny of other men (including such other men as psychiatrists and sociologists, in spite of Mr Wilson's fashionably arrogant dismissal of them).”
About Colin Wilson
Colin Henry Wilson (26 June 1931 – 5 December 2013) was a British writer, known for his first book The Outsider and over one hundred other books, including seventeen novels and many works in criminology, existential philosophy, psychology, religion, the occult, mysticism, wine, and music.