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Ask the Outsider what he ultimately wants,and he will admit he doesn't know.Why? Because he wants it instinctively,and it is not always possible to tell what your instincts are driving towards.

Colin Wilson

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Colin Wilson
Age: 82 †
Born: 1931
Born: June 26
Died: 2013
Died: December 5
Autobiographer
Biographer
Novelist
Philosopher
Prosaist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Ufologist
Writer
Leicester
England
Colin Henry Wilson
Always
Driving
Instinct
Towards
Instinctively
Wants
Outsider
Possible
Outsiders
Asks
Instincts
Tell
Admit
Doesn
Ultimately

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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
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If you asked me what is the basis of all my work, it's the feeling there's something basically wrong with human beings.
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The basic paradox about sex is that it always seems to be offering more than it can deliver. A glimpse of a girl undressing through a lighted bedroom window induces a vision of ecstatic delight, but in the actual process of persuading the girl into bed, the vision somehow evaporates.
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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.
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The visionary disciplines himself to see the world always as if he had only just seen it for the first time.
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Could it be that sexual perversion and romanticism sprang from the same longing for distant horizons?
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The real issue is not whether two and two make four or whether two and two make five, but whether life advances by men who love words or by men who love living.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The self-surmounter can never put up with the man who has ceased to be dissatisfied with himself.
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Turning on the light is easy if you know where the switch is.
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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.
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It was Rousseau who was largely responsible for the problem by giving currency to the idea that freedom can exist without responsibility and discipline.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I've always believed that a writer has got to remain an outsider.
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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.
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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