Colin Wilson Quotes

Colin Wilson delivers bold, thought-provoking reflections on mind, art, and society.

18 quotes

The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain.

#1
The complex develops out of the simple.

#2
The mind has exactly the same power as the hands: not merely to grasp the world, but to change it.

#3
A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.

#4
I had never doubted my own abilities, but I was quite prepared to believe that 'the world' would decline to recognize them.

#5
(Art)... rescues us from our self chosen triviality, to which we are so prone. It is like a deep organ note that makes my hair stir and a shiver run through me. I 'pull back' from life, like a camera taking a long shot with a wide angle lens. I quite simply become aware of more reality than before.

#6
The mystical impulse in men is somehow a desire to possess the universe. In women, it's a desire to be possessed.
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.
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.
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.
When I open my eyes in the morning, I am not confronted by a world, but by a million possible worlds.
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.
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.
It was Rousseau who was largely responsible for the problem by giving currency to the idea that freedom can exist without responsibility and discipline.
If I'd stayed on in London and carried on going to literary parties, it would have wrecked me as a writer.
Imagination should be used, not to escape reality but to create it.
If you asked me what is the basis of all my work, it's the feeling there's something basically wrong with human beings.
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.