“These men are in prison: that is the Outsider’s verdict. They are quite contented in prison—caged animals who have never known freedom; but it is prison all the same. And the Outsider? He is in prison too: nearly every Outsider… — Colin Wilson Copy Share Image
“Man is not a 'fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant'. He changed drastically when he developed 'divided consciousness' to cope with complexities of civilisation, and has been changing steadily ever since. His greatest problem, the problem that has caused most of his agonies and miseries, has been his attempt to compensate for the narrowing of cinsciousness and… — Colin Wilson Copy Share
“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… — Colin Wilson Copy Share Image
The mystical impulse in men is somehow a desire to possess the universe. In women, it's a desire to be possessed. — Colin Wilson Copy Share Image
The exploration of oneself is usually also an exploration of the world at large, of other writers, a process of comparison with oneself with… — Colin Wilson Copy Share Image
“There is in Shaw, as in Gurdjieff and Nietzsche, a recognition of the immense effort of Will that is necessary to express even a… — Colin Wilson Copy Share Image
I was aggressively nonpolitical. I believed that people who make a fuss about politics do so because their heads are too empty to think… — Colin Wilson Copy Share Image
Christianity was an epidemic rather than a religion. It appealed to fear, hysteria and ignorance. It spread across the Western world, not because it… — Colin Wilson Copy Share Image
When I open my eyes in the morning, I am not confronted by a world, but by a million possible worlds. — Colin Wilson Copy Share Image
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… — Colin Wilson Copy Share
Man is brilliant at solving problems; but solving them only makes him the victim of his own childishness and laziness. It is this recognition… — Colin Wilson Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
If I'd stayed on in London and carried on going to literary parties, it would have wrecked me as a writer. — Colin Wilson Copy Share Image
