“This is the Outsider's extremity. He does not prefer not to believe; he doesn't like feeling that futility gets the last word in the universe; his human nature would like to find something it can answer to with complete assent. But honesty prevents his accepting a solution that he cannot reason about.”

— Colin Wilson , book The Outsider

Source: The Outsider (1956), Chapter Five, The Pain Threshold

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "This is the Outsider's extremity. He does not prefer not to believe; he doesn't like feeling that futility gets the las…" by Colin Wilson?

Colin Wilson 192

author 1931–2013

James Agate (1877–1947) British diarist and critic

Ego, p. 303, September 17, 1933.

““The Outsider wants to cease to be an Outsider. He wants to be ‘balanced'. He would like to achieve a vividness of sense-perception (Lawrence, Van Gogh, Hemingway) He would also like to understand the human soul and its working and, be ‘possessed’ by a Will topower, to more life. (Barbusse and Mitya Karamazov) He would like to escape triviality forever. Above all, he would like to know how to express himself because that is the means by which he can get to know himself and hi unknown possibilities.””

Colin Wilson book The Outsider

Source: The Outsider (1956), Chapter Seven, The Great Synthesis...

“He measured all his fellow workers by the test of professionalism, and a professional is a man who can do his best work when he doesn't feel like it.”

Alistair Cooke (1908–2004) British journalist and broadcaster

About Humphrey Bogart
Six Men (1977)

“He doesn't believe that public swimming-pools and a kind word in time will right the wrongs of the world; moreover, he takes a drink whenever he feels like it.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

Quoted, This Side of Paradise (1920)

“As for acquiescing in what a man understands not, or cannot reconcile to his reason, they know best the fruits of it that practice it. For my part, I'm a stranger to it, and cannot reconcile myself to such a principle. On the contrary, I am pretty sure he pretends in vain to convince the judgment, who explains not the nature of the thing. A man may give his verbal assent to he knows not what, out of fear, superstition, indifference, interest, and the like feeble and unfair motives: but as long as he conceives not what he believes, he cannot sincerely acquiesce in it, and remains deprived of all solid satisfaction. … But he that comprehends a thing, is as sure of it as if he were himself the author.”

John Toland book Christianity not Mysterious

Christianity not Mysterious (1696), Section II: That the Doctrines of the Gospel are not contrary to Reason, Chapter 1

“A man must comport himself as a man. He must fight always preferably and soundly with the odds in his favor but on necessity against any sort of odds and with no thought of the outcome. He should follow his tribal laws and customs insofar as he can and accept the tribal discipline when he cannot. But it is never a reproach that he has kept a child's heart, a child's honesty and a child's freshness and nobility.”

Ernest Hemingway book True at First Light

Source: True at First Light (1999), Ch. 1

“Human ideologies are based on human believe and acceptance of one ideology by all human is not possible as long as each human could find answers about his existence by his own mind.”

Zaman Ali (1993) Pakistani philosopher

"Humanity", Ch.II "Ideologies: A way to live", Part I

“He who completes a quest does not merely find something. He becomes something.”

Lev Grossman The Magician King

Source: The Magician King

“As a mathematician Erdös is what in other fields is called a "natural". If a problem can be stated in terms he can understand, though it may belong to a field with which he is not familiar, he is as likely as, or even more likely than, the experts to find a solution.”

Mark Kac (1914–1984) Polish-American mathematician

Source: Enigmas Of Chance (1985), Chapter 4, On Toast!, p. 93.

“The fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself.”

Karl Marx book Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
Estranged Labour, p. 30.

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Colin Wilson 192

Related quotes

Related topics