Quotes from Colin Wilson

What I wanted to do was to try to create a philosophy upon a completely new foundation.

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.

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

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.

Man is the only animal who is prone to insanity.

Faculty X is a sense of reality of other places and other times, and it is the possession of it—fragmentary and uncertain though it is—that distinguishes man from all other animals.

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

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

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.

The complex develops out of the simple.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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.

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