Colin Wilson quotes:

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

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.

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.

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.

I've always been a pretty hard worker. That's how I've written over a hundred books.

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.

The mind has exactly the same power as the hands; not merely to grasp the world, but to change it.

A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.

I'm basically a writer of ideas, and the English aren't interested in ideas. The English, I'm afraid, are totally brainless.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Turning on the light is easy if you know where the switch is.

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.

When I was a teenager I was a total romantic escapist. My world was books.

If you asked me what is the basis of all my work, it's the feeling there's something basically wrong with human beings.

It seemed perfectly possible that, in spite of my certainty of my own genius, I might die of some illness, or perhaps even in a street accident, before I had ever glimpsed the meaning of life. My moods of happiness and self-confidence convinced me that I had a "destiny" to become a famous writer, and to be remembered as one of the most important thinkers of the century.

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.

Imagination should be used, not to escape reality but to create it.

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.

It struck me that the popularity of Christmas is a matter of web-like consciousness. Childhood conditions us to relax and expand at Christmas, to forget petty worries and irritations and think in terms of universal peace. And so Christmas is the nearest to mystical experience that most human beings ever approach, with its memories of Dickens and Irving's Bracebridge Hall.

Life itself is an exile. The way home is not the way back.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I had never doubted my own abilities, but I was quite prepared to believe that "the world" would decline to recognize them.

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.

Isaiah Berlin once said that there are two kinds of writers, hedgehogs and foxes. He said the fox knows many things, the hedgehog knows just one thing. So Shakespeare is a typical fox; Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky are typical hedgehogs. Now, I'm a typical hedgehog. I know just one thing, and I repeat it over and over again. I try to approach it from different angles to make it look different, but it's the same thing.

The worst crimes are not committed by evil degenerates, but by decent and intelligent people taking 'pragmatic' decisions.

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.

I have a strong antipathy to everything connected with gardens, gardening and gardeners. . . . Gardening seems to me a kind of admission of defeat. . . . Man was made for better things than pruning his rose trees. The state of mind of the confirmed gardener seems to me as reprehensible as that of the confirmed alcoholic. Both have capitulated to the world. Both have become lotus eaters and drifters.

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.

Too much success gets you resting on your laurels and creates a kind of quicksand that you can't get out of.

I've always believed that a writer has got to remain an outsider.

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

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.

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?

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.

Now individual consciousness, as typified in human beings, has great advantages and great disadvantages. Individuality means a narrowing, and narrowness can be useful. It is good for close-up work. We have invented the magnifying glass and the microscope to narrow our vision, because narrowness makes for precision. But narrowness also makes for a failure of purpose, for exhaustion of the will; for purpose depends upon a broad vision, a clear sight of one's objective.

The complex develops out of the simple.

Could it be that sexual perversion and romanticism sprang from the same longing for distant horizons?

It was Rousseau who was largely responsible for the problem by giving currency to the idea that freedom can exist without responsibility and discipline.

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.

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.

The "passion for incredulity" can produce as much self-deception as the uncritical will to believe.

The mystical impulse in men is somehow a desire to possess the universe. In women, it's a desire to be possessed.

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.

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.

The self-surmounter can never put up with the man who has ceased to be dissatisfied with himself.

Our language has become a tired and inefficient thing in the hands of journalists and writers who have nothing to say.

When I open my eyes in the morning, I am not confronted by a world, but by a million possible worlds.

Man is the only animal who is prone to insanity.

If I'd stayed on in London and carried on going to literary parties, it would have wrecked me as a writer.

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.

The visionary disciplines himself to see the world always as if he had only just seen it for the first time.

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.

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.