Top 70 Colin Wilson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Imagination should be used, not to escape reality but to create it.”

— Colin Wilson

Featured in: Imagination Quotes

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

— Colin Wilson

3. “When we pull back and get, for a moment, the ‘bird’s eye’ view of life, it reveals meanings that are ungraspable by the narrow focus of our usual worm’s eye view.”

— Colin Wilson

4. “When I open my eyes in the morning, I am not confronted by a world, but by a million possible worlds.”

— Colin Wilson

5. “Criminals interest me, because they’re driven by the same desires as we are, but they take these disastrous shortcuts and end up in a real mess.”

— Colin Wilson

6. “Life itself is an exile. The way home is not the way back.”

— Colin Wilson

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

— Colin Wilson

8. “Turning on the light is easy if you know where the switch is.”

— Colin Wilson

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

— Colin Wilson

10. “The vitality of the ordinary members of society is dependent on its Outsiders. Many Outsiders unify themselves, realize themselves as poets or saints. Others remain tragically divided and unproductive, but even they supply soul-energy to society; it is their strenuousness that purifies thought and prevents the bourgeois world from foundering under its own dead-weight; they are society’s spiritual dynamos.”

— Colin Wilson

11. “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.”

— Colin Wilson

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

— Colin Wilson

13. “Phenomenology is not a philosophy ; it is a philosophical method, a tool. It is like an adjustable spanner that can be used for dismantling a refrigerator or a car, or used for hammering in nails, or even for knocking somebody out.”

— Colin Wilson

14. “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.”

— Colin Wilson

15. “Boredom, passivity, stagnation: these are the beginning of mental illness, which propagates itself like the scum on a stagnant pond.”

— Colin Wilson

16. “I’m basically a writer of ideas, and the English aren’t interested in ideas. The English, I’m afraid, are totally brainless.”

— Colin Wilson

17. “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.”

— Colin Wilson

18. “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.”

— Colin Wilson

19. “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.”

— Colin Wilson

20. “The evidence of paranormal research shows that there is a part of our being that knows far more than the conscious mind. And the evidence of mystics through the ages suggests that there is a part of our being that knows even greater secrets than this.”

— Colin Wilson

21. “The visionary disciplines himself to see the world always as if he had only just seen it for the first time.”

— Colin Wilson

22. “Our language has become a tired and inefficient thing in the hands of journalists and writers who have nothing to say.”

— Colin Wilson

23. “Defeat is always self-chosen.”

— Colin Wilson

24. “A tired man is already in the grip of death and insanity... A sane man is a man who is fully awake. As he grows tired, he loses his ability to rise above dreams and delusions, and life becomes steadily more chaotic.”

— Colin Wilson

25. “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.”

— Colin Wilson

26. “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?”

— Colin Wilson

27. “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.”

— Colin Wilson

28. “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.”

— Colin Wilson

29. “Sexual activity is driven by the same aims and motives as reading poetry or listening to music: to escape the limitations imposed by the need for particularity in the consciousness.”

— Colin Wilson

30. “Man is the only animal who is prone to insanity.”

— Colin Wilson

31. “The self-surmounter can never put up with the man who has ceased to be dissatisfied with himself.”

— Colin Wilson

32. “With the use of a map, I could walk from Paris to Calcutta; without a map, I might find myself in Odessa. Well, if we had a similar ‘map’ of the human mind, a man could explore all the territory that lies between death and mystical vision, between catatonia and genius.”

— Colin Wilson

33. “It is far easier to write an angry letter than to go and say angry things to another person – because as soon as we look in one another’s faces we can see the other point of view.”

— Colin Wilson

34. “I love life and I want to live, to cry but cannot – I feel such a pain in my soul – a pain which frightens me. My soul is ill. My soul, not my mind. The doctors do not understand my illness... Everybody who reads these lines will suffer... My body is not ill, it is my soul that is ill.”

— Colin Wilson

35. “As a young man I was scornful about the supernatural but as I have got older, the sharp line that divided the credible from the incredible has tended to blur; I am aware that the whole world is slightly incredible.”

— Colin Wilson

36. “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.”

— Colin Wilson

37. “A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.”

— Colin Wilson

38. “The complex develops out of the simple.”

— Colin Wilson

39. “Simple perception then is a fallacy. Besides the conscious prejudices that we are aware of imposing on the world, there are a thousand subconscious prejudices that we assume to be actuality.”

— Colin Wilson

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

— Colin Wilson

41. “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.”

— Colin Wilson

42. “And the ape and the man exist in one body; and when the ape’s desires are about to be fulfilled, he disappears and is succeeded by the man, who is disgusted with the ape’s appetite.”

— Colin Wilson

43. “One of man’s deepest habits is keeping alert for dangers and difficulties, refusing to allow himself to explore his own mind because he daren’t take his eyes off the world around him.”

— Colin Wilson

44. “I’ve read Joyce and Sartre and Beckett and the rest, and every atom in me rejects what they say. They strike me as liars and fools. I don’t think they’re dishonest so much as hopelessly tired and defeated.”

— Colin Wilson

45. “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.”

— Colin Wilson

46. “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’.”

— Colin Wilson

47. “A young farm labourer passed me. I suddenly understood what Traherne meant when he said that men looked to him like angels. Again, it was a matter of seeing through to the inward vitality, the essence – what Boehme called the ‘signature’. I smiled at the farm labourer, and he smiled back and said: ‘Mornin’ sir.’ I felt suddenly very happy.”

— Colin Wilson

48. “Man must believe in realities outside his own smallness, outside the ‘triviality of everydayness’, if he is to do anything worthwhile.”

— Colin Wilson

49. “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.”

— Colin Wilson

50. “Faculty X is a sense of reality of other places and other times, and it is the possession of it – fragmentary and uncertain though it is – that distinguishes man from all other animals.”

— Colin Wilson