120 Quotes by Colin Wilson

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

The worst crimes are not committed by evil degenerates, but by decent and intelligent people taking ‘pragmatic’ decisions.

The mystical impulse in men is somehow a desire to possess the universe. In women, it’s a desire to be possessed.

There is in Shaw, as in Gurdjieff and Nietzsche, a recognition of the immense effort of Will that is necessary to express even a little freedom, that places them beside Pascal and St. Augustine as religious thinkers. Their view is saved from pessimism only by its mystical recognition of the possibilities of pure Will, freed from the entanglements of automatism.

I’ve always believed that a writer has got to remain an outsider.

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 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.

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.

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.