120 Quotes by Colin Wilson

Man is as much a slave to his immediate surroundings now as he was when he lived in tree-huts. Give him the highest, the most exciting thoughts about man’s place in the universe, the meaning of history; they can all be snuffed out in a moment if he wants his dinner, or feels irritated by a child squalling on a bus.

The Outsider’s case against society is very clear. All men and women have these dangerous, unnamable impulses, yet they keep up a pretence, to themselves, to others; their respectability, their philosophy, their religion, are all attempts to gloss over, to make look civilized and rational something that is savage, unorganized, irrational. He is an Outsider because he stands for Truth.

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’.

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.

As to Gurdjieff’s power to renew his own energies, its essence had been understood by psychologists of the nineteenth century, decades before the age of Freud and Jung. William James speaks about it in an important essay called ‘The Energies of Man’.

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?

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.

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.