Quotes by Colin Wilson

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

“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 its empty. You are the projectionist, and you should have been up there all the time.”

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

“The complex develops out of the simple.”

“What it means basically is that youre able to focus until you suddenly experience that sense that everything is good,”

“[He has been forced to test his own powers in this area enormously over the past year.] When I was pretty sure that the autobiography was going to be a great success, ... and when it, on the contrary, got viciously attacked... well, I know Im not wrong. Obviously the times are out of joint.”

“One of my main problems as far as the public is concerned is that Ive always been interested in too many things, ... and if they cant typecast you as a writer on this or that, then Im afraid you tend not to be understood at all.”

“The problem is everywhere. Youre never going to get away from it.”

“I wanted the hands to reach out to help the people who were hurt in the hurricane, ... And I wrote down the year on the button so everyone would remember it was this year.”

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.

And in a flash I understood the meaning of sex. It is a craving of mingling of consciousness, whose symbol is the mingling of bodies. Every time a man and a woman slake their thirst in the strange waters of the others identity, they glimpse the immensity of their freedom.

Man knows himself as body, and what he knows of spirit comes through grace. The poet would call it inspiration. But the spirit bloweth where it listeth. Man has no control over his inspiration. If a piece of music or a poem has moved him once, he can never be certain that it will happen again. But man hates to think that he has no control over the spirit. It would discourage him too much. He likes to believe that he can summon the spirit by some ordinary act. Instead of striving to prepare himself for it through discipline and prayer, he tries to summon it arbitrarily through some physical act—drinking Düsseldorf beer, for instance. . . Stein said, chuckling:Which is the way all good Düsseldorfers summon the spirit, since our Dunkelbier is the best in Germany. The priest laughed with him, and for a moment Sorme had a curious impression that he was listening to an argument between two undergraduates instead of two men in their late sixties. He shrank deeper into his armchair, wanting them to forget his presence. The priest stopped laughing first, and Sorme had a glimpse of the tiredness that always lay behind his eyes. Stein also became grave again. He said: Very well. But what has this to do with the murderer? It has to do with sex. For sex is the favourite human device for summoning the spirit. And since it is also Gods gift of procreation, it nearly always works. . . unlike music and poetry. Or beer, Stein said. Quite. But even sex is not infallible. And man hates to think that he has no power over the spirit. The more his physical methods fail him, the more voraciously he pursues them. His attempts to summon the spirit become more and more frenzied. If he is a drinker, he drinks more, until he has more alcohol than blood in his veins. If he is a sensualist, he invents sexual perversions. Ah, Stein said. There are many other ways, of course—the lust for money and power, for instance. All depend upon mans refusal to face the fact that the spirit bloweth where it listeth, that no physical act can be guaranteed to summon it. . .

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

The nineteenth century was the Age of Romanticism; for the first time in history, man stopped thinking of himself as an animal or a slave, and saw himself as a potential god. All of the cries of revolt against God - De Sade, Byrons Manfred, Schillers Robbers, Goethes Faust, Hoffmanns mad geniuses - are expressions of this new spirit. Is this why the spirits decided to make a planned and consistent effort at communication? It was the right moment. Man was beginning to understand himself.

Sometimes life is intensely interesting and meaningful, and this meaning seems to be an objective fact, like sunlight. At other times its as meaningless and futile as the wind. We accept this eclipse of meaning as we accept changes in the weather. If I wake up with a bad cold or a headache, I seem to be deaf to meaning. Now if I woke up physically deaf or half-blind, Id feel there was something wrong and consult a doctor. But when Im deaf to meaning, I accept it as something natural. Esmond didnt accept it as natural. And he also noticed that every time were sexually stimulated, meaning returns. We can hear again. So he pursued sex as a way of recovering meaning.

Youve a perfect right to call me as impractical as a dormouse, and to feel Im out of touch with life. But this is the point where we simply cant see eye to eye. Weve nothing whatever in common. Dont you see. . . its not an accident thats drawn me from Blake to Whitehead, its a certain line of thought which is fundamental to my whole approach. You see, theres something about them both. . . They trusted the universe. You say I dont know what the modern worlds like, but thats obviously untrue. Anyone whos spent a week in London knows just what its like. . . if you mean neurosis and boredom and the rest of it. And I do read a modern novel occasionally, in spite of what you say. Ive 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 dont think theyre dishonest so much as hopelessly tired and defeated.Lewis had lit his pipe. He did it as if Reade were speaking to someone else. Now he said, smiling faintly, I dont think were discussing modern literature.Reade had an impulse to call the debaters trick, but he repressed it. Instead he said quietly, Were discussing modern life, and you brought up the subject. And Im trying to explain why I dont think that murders and wars prove your point. Im writing about Whitehead because his fundamental intuition of the universe is the same as my own. I believe like Whitehead that the universe is a single organism that somehow takes account of us. I dont believe that modern man is a stranded fragment of life in an empty universe. Ive an instinct that tells me that theres a purpose, and that I can understand that purpose more deeply by trusting my instinct. I cant believe the world is meaningless. I dont expect life to explode in my face at any moment. When I walk back to my cottage, I dont feel like a meaningless fragment of life walking over a lot of dead hills. I feel a part of the landscape, as if its somehow aware of me, and friendly.

Faculty X is simply that latent power in human beings possess to reach beyond the present. After all, we know perfectly well that the past is as real as the present, and that New York and Singapore and Lhasa and Stepney Green are all as real as the place I happen to be in at the moment. Yet my senses do not agree. They assure me that this place, here and now, is far more real than any other place or any other time. Only in certain moments of great inner intensity do I know this to be a lie. Faculty X is a sense of reality, the 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

There can be no doubt that the chief fault we have developed, through the long course of human evolution, is a certain basic passivity. When provoked by challenges, human beings are magnificent. When life is quiet and even, we take the path of least resistance, and then wonder why we feel bored. A man who is determined and active doesnt pay much attention to luck. If things go badly, he takes a deep breath and redoubles his effort. And he quickly discovers that his moments of deepest happiness often come after such efforts. The man who has become accustomed to a passive existence becomes preoccupied with luck; it may become an obsession. When things go well, he is delighted and good humored; when they go badly, he becomes gloomy and petulant. He is unhappy—or dissatisfied—most of the time, for even when he has no cause for complaint, he feels that gratitude would be premature; things might go wrong at any moment; you cant really trust the world... Gambling is one basic response to this passivity, revealing the obsession with luck, the desire to make things happen.The absurdity about this attitude is that we fail to recognize the active part we play in making life a pleasure. When my will is active, my whole mental and physical being works better, just as my digestion works better if I take exercise between meals. I gain an increasing feeling of control over my life, instead of the feeling of helplessness (what Sartre calls contingency) that comes from long periods of passivity. Yet even people who are intelligent enough to recognize this find the habit of passivity so deeply ingrained that they find themselves holding their breath when things go well, hoping fate will continue to be kind.

No matter how honest scientists think they are, they are still influenced by various unconscious assumptions that prevent them from attaining true objectivity. Expressed in a sentence, Forts principle goes something like this: People with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels.

Reade drew a deep breath. He said with resignation, All right. Ill try to explain. But its rather difficult. You see, Ive devoted my life to the problem of why certain men see visions. Men like Blake and Boehme and Thomas Traherne. A psychologist once suggested that its a chemical in the bloodstream—the same sort of thing that makes a dipsomaniac see pink elephants. Now obviously, I cant accept this view. But Ive spent a certain amount of time studying the action of drugs, and taken some of them myself. And its become clear to me that what we call ordinary consciousness is simply a special, limited case. . . But this is obvious after a single glass of whiskey. It causes a change in consciousness, a kind of deepening. In ordinary consciousness, were mainly aware of the world around us and its problems. This is awfully difficult to explain. . .Fisher said, Youre being very clear so far. Please go on.Perhaps an analogy will help. In our ordinary state of consciousness, we look out from behind our eyes as a motorist looks from behind the windscreen of a car. The car is very small, and the world out there is very big. Now if I take a few glasses of whiskey, the world out there hasnt really changed, but the car seems to have grown bigger. When I look inside myself, there seem to be far greater spaces than Im normally aware of. And if I take certain drugs, the car becomes vast, as vast as a cathedral. There are great, empty spaces. . . No, not empty. Theyre full of all kinds of things—of memories of my past life and millions of things I never thought Id noticed. Do you see my point? Man deliberately limits his consciousness. It would frighten him if he were aware of these vast spaces of consciousness all the time. He stays sane by living in a narrow little consciousness that seems to be limited by the outside world. Because these spaces arent just inhabited by memories. There seem to be strange, alien things, other minds. . .As he said this, he saw Violet de Merville shudder. He said, laughing, Im not trying to be alarming. Theres nothing fundamentally horrible about these spaces. One day we shall conquer them, as we shall conquer outer space. Theyre like a great jungle, full of wild creatures. We build a high wall around us for safety, but that doesnt mean were afraid of the jungle. One day we shall build cities and streets in its spaces.