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
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.
way outsiders found
The outsider is not sure who he is. He has found an “I”, but it is not his true “I”.’ His main business is to find his way back to himself.
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.
morning eye world
When I open my eyes in the morning, I am not confronted by a world, but by a million possible worlds.
believe world decline
I had never doubted my own abilities, but I was quite prepared to believe that "the world" would decline to recognize them.
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.
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.
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.
men desire mystical
The mystical impulse in men is somehow a desire to possess the universe. In women, it's a desire to be possessed.
christmas memories thinking
It struck me that the popularity of Christmas is a matter of web-like consciousness. Childhood conditions us to relax and expand at Christmas, to forget petty worries and irritations and think in terms of universal peace. And so Christmas is the nearest to mystical experience that most human beings ever approach, with its memories of Dickens and Irving's Bracebridge Hall.
ideas brainless
I'm basically a writer of ideas, and the English aren't interested in ideas. The English, I'm afraid, are totally brainless.
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.
fun mean people
Being very famous is not the fun it sounds. It merely means you're being chased by a lot of people and you lose your privacy.
responsibility ideas giving
It was Rousseau who was largely responsible for the problem by giving currency to the idea that freedom can exist without responsibility and discipline.