Quotes from book
The Outsider

The Outsider

Colin Wilson

The Outsider is a 1956 book by English writer Colin Wilson.Through the works and lives of various artists – including H. G. Wells , Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Harley Granville-Barker , Hermann Hesse, T. E. Lawrence, Vincent van Gogh, Vaslav Nijinsky, George Bernard Shaw, William Blake, Friedrich Nietzsche, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and George Gurdjieff – Wilson explores the psyche of the Outsider, his effect on society, and society's effect on him.

“The Outsider’s case against society is very clear. All men and women have these dangerous, unnamable impulses, yet they keep up a pretense, to themselves, to others; their respectability, their philosophy, their religion, are all attempts to gloss over, to make civilized and rational something that is savage, unorganized, irrational. He is an Outsider because he stands for truth.”

Colin Wilson book The Outsider

Source: The Outsider (1956), Chapter one, The Country of the Blind

“It is not enough to accept a concept of order and live by it; that is cowardice, and such cowardice cannot result from freedom. Chaos must be faced. Real order must be preceded by a descent into chaos.”

Colin Wilson book The Outsider

Source: The Outsider (1956), Chapter Three, The Romantic Outsider

“Anyone who can understand that the Buddhist idea of Nirvana is not merely negative, and that the Buddha himself who (like the Superman) 'looks down on suffering humanity like a hillsman on the planes' is not an atheistic monster, will instantly see how this misses the point. Nietzsche was not an atheist, any more than the Buddha was. Anyone who reads the Night Song and the Dance Song in Zarathustra will recognize that they spring out of the same emotion as the Vedic or Gathic hymns or the Psalms of David. The idea of the Superman is a response to the need for salvation in precisely the same way that Buddhism was a response to the 'three signs.”

Colin Wilson book The Outsider

Source: The Outsider (1956), p. 135

“Normally man’s mind is composed only of a consciousness of his immediate needs, which is to say that this consciousness at any moment can be defined as ‘’his awareness of his own power to satisfy those needs.’’ He thinks in terms of what he intends to do in half an hour’s time, a day’s time, a month’s time an no more. He never asks himself: what are the ‘’limits’’ of my powers? In a sense, he is like a man who has a fortune is the bank, who never asks himself, How much money have I got, but only, Have I enough for a pound of cheese, a new tie, etc.”

Colin Wilson book The Outsider

Source: The Outsider (1956), Chapter Six, The Question of Identity

“The unbeliever walks for a quadrillion miles, yet one moments of reality makes up for it.”

Colin Wilson book The Outsider

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

“These men traveling down to the City in the morning, reading their newspapers or staring at advertisements above the opposite seats, they have no doubt of who they are. Inscribe on the placard in place of the advertisement for corn-plasters, Elliot's lines: We are the hollow men”

Colin Wilson book The Outsider

The Outsider (1956)

“The Outsider is always unhappy, but he is an agent that ensures the happiness for millions of 'Insiders.”

Colin Wilson book The Outsider

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

“The Outsider may be an artist, but the artist is not necessarily an Outsider.”

Colin Wilson book The Outsider

Source: The Outsider (1956), Chapter one, The Country of the Blind

“The vitality of the ordinary members of society is dependent it’s Outsiders.”

Colin Wilson book The Outsider

Source: The Outsider (1956), Chapter Three, The Romantic Outsider

“Barbusse has shown us that the Outsider is a man who cannot live in the comfortable, insulated world of the bourgeois, accepting what he sees and touches as reality.”

Colin Wilson book The Outsider

Source: The Outsider (1956), Chapter one, The Country of the Blind

“The exploration of oneself is usually also an exploration of the world at large, of other writers, a process of comparison with oneself with others, discoveries of kinships, gradual illumination of one's own potentialities.”

Colin Wilson book The Outsider

Source: The Outsider (1956), p. 231

“In refusing to face evil, Sinclair has gained nothing and lost a great deal; the Buddhist scripture expenses it: those who refuse to discriminate might as well be dead.”

Colin Wilson book The Outsider

Source: The Outsider (1956), Chapter Three, The Romantic Outsider

“Humanism is only another name for spiritual laziness, or a vague half-creed adopted by men of science and logicians whose heads are too occupied with the world of mathematics and physics to worry about religious categories.”

Colin Wilson book The Outsider

Source: The Outsider (1956), Chapter Nine, Breaking the Circuit

““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...

“Man is as much a slave to his immediate surroundings now as he was when he lived in tree-huts. Give him the highest, the most exciting thoughts about man's place in the universe, the meaning of history; they can all be snuffed out in a moment if he wants his dinner, or feels irritated by a child squalling on a bus. He is bound by pettiness.”

Colin Wilson book The Outsider

Source: The Outsider (1956), Chapter Two, World Without Values

“There certainly is self division. The man who watches a woman undressing has the red eyes of an ape; yet the man who sees two young lovers, really alone for the first time, who brings out all the pathos, the tenderness and uncertainty when he tells about it, is no brute; he is very much human. And the ape and the man exist in one body; and when the ape's desires are about to be fulfilled, he disappears and is succeeded by the man, who is disgusted with the ape's appetite.”

Colin Wilson book The Outsider

Source: The Outsider (1956), Chapter one, The Country of the Blind

“Nietzsche's great concept of Yea-saying gave him a notion of purpose that is seen as positive. Nietzsche, in short, was a religious mystic.”

Colin Wilson book The Outsider

Source: The Outsider (1956), p. 275

“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

“Self-expression is impossible in relation with other men; their self-expression interferes with it. The greatest heights of self-expression in poetry, music, painting – are achieved by men who are supremely alone.”

Colin Wilson book The Outsider

Source: The Outsider (1956), Chapter Eight, The Outsider as a Visionary

“The Diary of Vaslav Nijinjsky reaches a limit of sincerity beyond any of the documents that we have referred to on this study. There are other modern works that express the same sense that civilized life is a form of living death; notably the poetry of T. S. Eliot and the novels of Franz Kafka; but there is an element of prophetic denunciation in both, the attitude of healthy men rebuking their sick neighbors. We possess no other record of the Outsider's problems that was written by a man about to be defeated and permanently smashed by those problems.”

Colin Wilson book The Outsider

Source: The Outsider (1956), p. 115

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