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

Colin Wilson

Categorized in : World Vision Discipline

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.

criminals real desire

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

tired language hands

Man is the only animal who is prone to insanity. by Colin Wilson

Man is the only animal who is prone to insanity.

animal men insanity

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

lines men world

Too much success gets you resting on your laurels and creates a kind of quicksand that you can't get out of.

laurels too-much kind

The "passion for incredulity" can produce as much self-deception... by Colin Wilson

The "passion for incredulity" can produce as much self-deception as the uncritical will to believe.

passion self believe

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.

hero people thinking

I have a strong antipathy to everything connected with gardens, gardening and gardeners. . . . Gardening seems to me a kind of admission of defeat. . . . Man was made for better things than pruning his rose trees. The state of mind of the confirmed gardener seems to me as reprehensible as that of the confirmed alcoholic. Both have capitulated to the world. Both have become lotus eaters and drifters.

garden strong men

The complex develops out of the simple. by Colin Wilson

The complex develops out of the simple.

complexes simple

Could it be that sexual perversion and romanticism sprang from the same longing for distant horizons?

perversion longing horizon

The Americans have always been more open to my ideas. In fact, I could earn a living in America just by lecturing. One of my brightest audiences, incidentally, were the prisoners in a Philadelphia gaol - brighter than my students at university.

philadelphia america ideas

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.

illumination discovery world

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.

perception simple world

In the mid nineteenth century, the typical murderer was a drunken illiterate; a hundred years later the typical murderer regards himself as a thinking man.

men years thinking

It was Rousseau who was largely responsible for the problem by giving currency to the idea that freedom can exist without responsibility and discipline.

discipline responsibility ideas

Now the basic impulse behind existentialism is optimistic, very much like the impulse behind all science. Existentialism is romanticism, and romanticism is the feeling that man is not the mere he has always taken himself for. Romanticism began as a tremendous surge of optimism about the stature of man. Its aim - like that of science - was to raise man above the muddled feelings and impulses of his everyday humanity, and to make him a god-like observer of human existence.

optimistic taken men

I've always believed that a writer has got to remain an outsider. by Colin Wilson

I've always believed that a writer has got to remain an outsider.

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.

philosophical car philosophy

The effects of mescalin or LSD can be, in some respects, far more satisfying than those of alcohol. To begin with, they last longer; they also leave behind no hangover, and leave the mental faculties clear and unimpaired. They stimulate the faculties and produce the ideal ground for a peak experience.

hangover alcohol lasts

It seemed perfectly possible that, in spite of my certainty of my own genius, I might die of some illness, or perhaps even in a street accident, before I had ever glimpsed the meaning of life. My moods of happiness and self-confidence convinced me that I had a "destiny" to become a famous writer, and to be remembered as one of the most important thinkers of the century.

self-confidence destiny important