Quotes from Colin Wilson

I had learned a basic lesson: that the secret of avoiding boredom is to have a strong sense of purpose.

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. Young W.B. Yeats wanted a fairy land where 'the lonely of heart is withered away.' Dowson and Thompson and Beddoes were 'half in love with easeful death': They are not long, the days of wine and roses Out of a misty dream Our path emerges for a while, then closes Within a dream.

You might say that the scientist is nothing more than a glorified accident-investigator. And the accident-investigator is himself the product of accident. But man is more deeply moved by meaning than by accident.

the man who thinks too much is likely to go to exhausted extremes where the world becomes a shadowy paradigm of ideas. To keep sane he must continually come back to reality.

Time like an ever rolling stream bears all its sons away They fly forgotten as a dream dies at the opening day.

if I lost faith in the order of things, if I were convinced that everything is a disorderly, damnable, devil-ridden chaos, if I were struck by every horror of man's disillusion—still I should want to live.

it is only the species Homo sapiens that is played out. 'The stars in their courses have turned against him and he has to give place to some other animal better adapted to face the fate that closes in on mankind.' In the final pages of the pamphlet, his trump of the last judgement has changed into the question: Can civilization be saved?

In the scales of the gigantic balance-pan in Nijinsky's brain, the world's misery bulked heavy on one side. But the other? First, there was dancing, the rhythmic, violent Dionysian upsurge of the vital energies; while he could dance regularly, every day, and restore contact with the vital, instinctive parts of his own being, Nijinsky could not go insane. Sanity lay in creation.

I look like him, only he has a calm gaze, and my eyes look around me. I am a man of motion, not of immobility. And this is the centre of the problem. Denied motion, the strain begins. The static personality is a prison:

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'. It is still a question of self-expression.

the fact remains that the Outsider is the rarity among human beings—which places him rather in the position of the soldier who claims he is the only one in step in the platoon. What about all the millions of men and women in our modern cities; are they really all the Outsider claims they are: futile, unreal, unutterably lost without knowing it?

In The Secret Life we see the Outsider cut off from other people by an intelligence that ruthlessly destroys their values, and prevents him from self-expression through his inability to substitute new values. His problem is Ecclesiastes' 'Vanitatum vanitas'; nothing is worth doing.

Sentencing Packer, Judge Melville Gerry gave vent to his feelings along unexpectedly political lines: "There were only seven Democrats in Hinsdale County, and you ate five of them, you depraved Republican son-of-a-bitch!

Nietzsche was not an atheist, any more than the Buddha was.* Anyone who reads the Night Song and the Dance Song in Zarathustra will recognize that they spring out the same emotion as the Vedic or Gathic hymns or the Psalms of David. The idea of the Superman is a response to the need for salvation in precisely the same way that Buddhism was a response to the 'three signs'.

The deluded vision of personality that our Western civilization fosters and glorifies, increases the inward division; Lawrence recognized it as the enemy. The war against it is therefore inevitably a revolt against Western civilization.

If I examine a painting through a microscope I shall learn about the texture of the paint, but nothing about the artists intention in painting the picture

He learned from Novalis that every man is potentially hero and genius; that only inertia keeps men mediocre.

it must be remembered that we are looking at these things from the Outsider's point of view, and it is Roquentin who condemns men who think their existence is necessary as salauds. The Outsider's business is to discriminate between real and unreal, necessary and unnecessary.

The Outsider is primarily a critic, and if a critic feels deeply enough about what he is criticizing, he becomes a prophet.

In his embryonic form, as the Outsider, he does not know himself well enough to understand the driving force behind his feelings. That is why his chief concern is with thinking, not with doing.

Avevo letto da qualche parte la parola 'nichilismo' e a scuola chiesi al mio insegnante di inglese cosa significasse. Significa non credere in niente mi rispose, e subito seppi di aver trovato un nome per il mio stato d'animo. Non era solo mancanza di qualcosa in cui credere, era non credere, di fatto, in niente.

For the Outsider, the world into which he has been born is always a world without values.. Unless he can evolve a set of values that will correspond to his own higher intensity of purpose, he may as well throw himself under a bus.

Più grande è la sfida, migliori sono gli uomini che la affrontano.

I never write purely for the fun of it. I write as a mathematician uses a sheet of paper for doing calculations: because I think better that way