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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.

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
Giving
Discipline
Exist
Responsibility
Freedom
Idea
Rousseau
Problem
Largely
Ideas
Currency
Without
Responsible

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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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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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The self-surmounter can never put up with the man who has ceased to be dissatisfied with himself.
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A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.
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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 had never doubted my own abilities, but I was quite prepared to believe that the world would decline to recognize them.
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Faculty X is a sense of 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.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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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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Sexual activity is driven by the same aims and motives as reading poetry or listening to music: to escape the limitations imposed by the need for particularity in the consciousness.
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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?
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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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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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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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