Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson
Colin Henry Wilsonwas an English writer, philosopher and novelist. He also wrote widely on true crime, mysticism and the paranormal. Wilson called his philosophy "new existentialism" or "phenomenological existentialism", and maintained his life work was "that of a philosopher, andpurpose to create a new and optimistic existentialism"...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth26 June 1931
rain men average
The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain.
too-much kind laurels
Too much success gets you resting on your laurels and creates a kind of quicksand that you can't get out of.
taken optimistic men
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.
eye views bird
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
party london ifs
If I'd stayed on in London and carried on going to literary parties, it would have wrecked me as a writer.
feelings working-it bases
If you asked me what is the basis of all my work, it's the feeling there's something basically wrong with human beings.
hero thinking people
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.
philosophy philosophical car
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.
science feet survival
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.
hands tree training
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?
wall spring cutting
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.
simple complexes
The complex develops out of the simple.
tired hands language
Our language has become a tired and inefficient thing in the hands of journalists and writers who have nothing to say.
simple perception 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.