Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Colin Wilson (British Philosopher)

Colin Henry Wilson (1931–2013) was a British critic and novelist. He made a big name for himself when he was twenty-four years old with a book called The Outsider, a history of alienation in western civilization. He then published more than 150 books of fiction and non-fiction.

Born in Leicester, Leicestershire, Wilson attended Gateway Secondary Technical School until the age of sixteen. He worked as a laboratory helper, civil servant, manual worker, dishwasher, and industrial worker. He served in the Royal Air Force 1949–50 and was discharged on medical grounds. He lived in Paris and Strasbourg in 1950–51 and worked in a coffee bar while writing his first book.

Wilson earned instant distinction with The Outsider (1956,) an assessment of existential alienation in modern society. It included literary characters in works by Camus, Hemingway, and Dostoyevsky and such personalities as Van Gogh, Nietzsche, Kafka, Camus, Sartre, T. E. Lawrence, and others.

Wilson’s prolific later output of over 150 books spanned dozens of unrelated genres, including mysticism, crime, the occult, human sexuality, and science fiction; his notable novels include Ritual in the Dark (1960,) The Mind Parasites (1967,) and The Space Vampires (1976.)

Wilson’s non-fiction works include Religion and the Rebel (1957,) The Strength to Dream (1962,) Bernard Shaw: A Reassessment (1969,) and The Essential Colin Wilson (1985.) Dreaming to Some Purpose (2004) is an autobiography.

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by 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
Topics: Vision

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
Topics: Responsibility

The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain.
—Colin Wilson
Topics: Originality, Rain, Age

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

The complex develops out of the simple.
—Colin Wilson
Topics: Simplicity

A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.
—Colin Wilson
Topics: Music

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
Topics: Authors & Writing

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