Colin Wilson Men Quotations

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

I have a strong antipathy to everything connected with gardens, gardening and gardeners. . . . Gardening seems to me a kind of admission of defeat. . . . Man was made for better things than pruning his rose trees. The state of mind of the confirmed gardener seems to me as reprehensible as that of the confirmed alcoholic. Both have capitulated to the world. Both have become lotus eaters and drifters.

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.

Man is the only animal who is prone to insanity.

The mystical impulse in men is somehow a desire to possess the universe. In women, it's a desire to be possessed.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

One cannot ignore half of life for the purposes of science, and then claim that the results of science give a full and adequate picture of the meaning of life. All discussions of 'life' which begin with a description of man's place on a speck of matter in space, in an endless evolutionary scale, are bound to be half-measures, because they leave out most of the experiences which are important to use as human beings.

The self-surmounter can never put up with the man who has ceased to be dissatisfied with himself.