Colin Wilson
The mind has exactly the same power as the hands; not merely to grasp the world, but to change it.Collection: Change
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.Collection: Famous
When I was a teenager I was a total romantic escapist. My world was books.Collection: Romantic
If I'd stayed on in London and carried on going to literary parties, it would have wrecked me as a writer.
What I wanted to do was to try to create a philosophy upon a completely new foundation.
A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.
The complex develops out of the simple.
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 average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain.
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.
If you asked me what is the basis of all my work, it's the feeling there's something basically wrong with human beings.
I'm basically a writer of ideas, and the English aren't interested in ideas. The English, I'm afraid, are totally brainless.
I've always been a pretty hard worker. That's how I've written over a hundred books.
Life itself is an exile. The way home is not the way back.Collection: Home
Imagination should be used, not to escape reality but to create it.Collection: Reality
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 viewCollection: Eye
When I open my eyes in the morning, I am not confronted by a world, but by a million possible worlds.Collection: Morning
Man is the only animal who is prone to insanity.Collection: Animal
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.Collection: Want
The outsider is not sure who he is. He has found an “I”, but it is not his true “I”.’ His main business is to find his way back to himself.Collection: Way
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.Collection: Ignorance
The worst crimes are not committed by evil degenerates, but by decent and intelligent people taking 'pragmatic' decisions.Collection: Intelligent
Turning on the light is easy if you know where the switch is.Collection: Light
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.Collection: Literature
The mystical impulse in men is somehow a desire to possess the universe. In women, it's a desire to be possessed.Collection: Men
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?Collection: Hands
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.Collection: Science
I've always believed that a writer has got to remain an outsider.Collection: Outsiders
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.Collection: Girl
I had never doubted my own abilities, but I was quite prepared to believe that "the world" would decline to recognize them.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Two
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.Collection: Reading
Too much success gets you resting on your laurels and creates a kind of quicksand that you can't get out of.Collection: Too Much
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.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Wall
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.Collection: Philosophy
Our language has become a tired and inefficient thing in the hands of journalists and writers who have nothing to say.Collection: Tired
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.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Hangover
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.Collection: Ideas
The visionary disciplines himself to see the world always as if he had only just seen it for the first time.Collection: Discipline
It was Rousseau who was largely responsible for the problem by giving currency to the idea that freedom can exist without responsibility and discipline.Collection: Responsibility
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.Collection: Christmas
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.Collection: Discovery
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 incredibleCollection: Men
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.Collection: Simple
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.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Strong