56+ Colin Wilson Quotes On God, Philosophical And Provocative

Colin Wilson was an English writer, philosopher and novelist who wrote over a hundred books. He is best known for his 1956 book The Outsider, which examines the psychology of alienation and the quest for meaning in life. He also wrote extensively on crime, mysticism, the paranormal, and the occult. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Colin Wilson on god, philosophical, provocative.

Top 10 Colin Wilson Quotes

1. Life itself is an exile. The way home is not the way back.
2. The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain.
3. 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?
4. Imagination should be used, not to escape reality but to create it.
5. The mind has exactly the same power as the hands; not merely to grasp the world, but to change it.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. The worst crimes are not committed by evil degenerates, but by decent and intelligent people taking 'pragmatic' decisions.
9. 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.
10. The mystical impulse in men is somehow a desire to possess the universe. In women, it's a desire to be possessed.

Colin Wilson Short Quotes

• A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.
• The complex develops out of the simple.
• The "passion for incredulity" can produce as much self-deception as the uncritical will to believe.
• I've always believed that a writer has got to remain an outsider.
• The self-surmounter can never put up with the man who has ceased to be dissatisfied with himself.
• Man is the only animal who is prone to insanity.
• Turning on the light is easy if you know where the switch is.

Colin Wilson Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — Colin Wilson

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. — Colin Wilson

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. — Colin Wilson

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. — Colin Wilson

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

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

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. — Colin Wilson

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. — Colin Wilson

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. — Colin Wilson

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. — Colin Wilson

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. — Colin Wilson

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. — Colin Wilson

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

Dr. Miller says we are pessimistic because life seems like a very bad, very screwed-up film. If you ask What the hell is wrong with the projector? and go up to the control room, you find it's empty. You are the projectionist, and you should have been up there all the time. — Colin Wilson

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. — Colin Wilson

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. — Colin Wilson

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. — Colin Wilson

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

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. — 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. — Colin Wilson

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. — Colin Wilson

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. — Colin Wilson

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. — Colin Wilson

It is true that there are exercises that can strengthen the 'muscle' that enable us to push back the bounds of acceptation. But these are relatively unimportant. The real problem is that we are trapped in misconceptions that always deceive us, as the matador's cape deceives the bull; that continue to deceive us a million times over the course of a lifetime. Wittgenstein once said that traditional philosophy causes a form of mental cramp, and that the aim of his philosophy was to remove this mental cramp, or to 'show the fly the way out of the bottle'. Our misconceptions involve the passive fallacy and notion that consciousness is a plane mirror that cannot lie about the world it reflects. — Colin Wilson

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

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. — Colin Wilson

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. — Colin Wilson

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

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

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

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. — Colin Wilson

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 — Colin Wilson

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. — Colin Wilson

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. — Colin Wilson

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. — Colin Wilson

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

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

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 — Colin Wilson

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. — Colin Wilson

Life Lessons by Colin Wilson

1. Colin Wilson taught us to never give up on our dreams, no matter how difficult the journey may be. He showed us that with hard work and dedication, we can achieve anything we set our minds to.
2. He also demonstrated the importance of learning from our mistakes and using them as a way to grow and improve ourselves.
3. Lastly, he showed us that it is possible to find joy and beauty in the world, even in the darkest of times.