Quotes from Colin Wilson

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.

The body will destroy the germs of a physical illness within a week; but the mind will preserve germs of morbidity or fear for a lifetime.

Man is an animal who is trying to evolve into a god. Many of his problems are an inevitable result of this struggle.

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

Man is a continent, but his conscious mind is no larger than a back garden…man consists almost entirely of unrealized potentials.

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 is important to graps 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 Outsider is he who cannot accept life as it is, who cannot consider his own existence or anyone else's necessary. He sees 'too deep and too much'.

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.

Modern man has the possibility of understanding the mechanism of consciousness, and marching directly towards his objective, with the will flexed to its maximum efficiency.

A tired man is already in the grip of death and insanity ... A sane man is a man who is fully awake. As he grows tired, he loses his ability to rise above dreams and delusions, and life becomes steadily more chaotic.

The vitality of the ordinary members of society is dependent on its Outsiders. Many Outsiders unify themselves, realize themselves as poets or saints. Others remain tragically divided and unproductive, but even they supply soul-energy to society; it is their strenuousness that purifies thought and prevents the bourgeois world from foundering under its own dead-weight; they are society's spiritual dynamos.

Mind is not really 'inside' us in the same sense that our intestines are. Our individuality is a kind of eddy in the sea of mind, a reflection of the total identity of the universal humanity.

If we force ourselves to press on, a surprising thing happens. The fatigue gets worse, up to a point, then suddenly vanishes, and we feel better than before.

Man lives and evolves by 'eating' significance, as a child eats food. The deeper his sense of wonder, the wider his curiosity, the stronger his vitality becomes, and the more powerful his grip on his own existence.

Boredom, passivity, stagnation: these are the beginning of mental illness, which propagates itself like the scum on a stagnant pond.

The mentally healthy individual", writes Wilson. "is he who habitually calls upon fairly deep levels of vital reserves. An individual whose mind is allowed to become dormant – so that only the surface is disturbed – begins to suffer from 'circulation problems'. Neurosis is the feeling of being cut off from your own powers.

Un tom?r j?s p?r?em d?vaina tukšuma saj?ta — lai ko j?s dar?tu, nekam nav noz?mes. Tieši tas noteikti ir divdesmit? gadsimta mor?l? bankrota c?lonis.

The evidence of paranormal research shows that there is a part of our being that knows far more than the conscious mind. And the evidence of mystics through the ages suggests that there is a part of our being that knows even greater secrets than this.

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.

With the use of a map, I could walk from Paris to Calcutta; without a map, I might find myself in Odessa. Well, if we had a similar 'map' of the human mind, a man could explore all the territory that lies between death and mystical vision, between catatonia and genius.

i like hunchbacks and other freaks. I am myself a freak who has feelings and sensitiveness, and I can dance like a hunchback. I am an artist who likes all shapes and all beauty.

I love life and I want to live, to cry but cannot—I feel such a pain in my soul—a pain which frightens me. My soul is ill. My soul, not my mind. The doctors do not understand my illness.... Everybody who reads these lines will suffer.... My body is not ill, it is my soul that is ill.

Man must believe in realities outside his own smallness, outside the 'triviality of everydayness', if he is to do anything worthwhile.