Colin Wilson Quotes

Yet in truth the big question Camus asked was never the Anglo-American liberal one: How can we make the world a little bit better tomorrow? It was the grander French one: Why not kill yourself tonight? That the answers come to much the same thing in the end-easy does it; tomorrow may be a bit better than today; and, after all, you have to have a little faith in people-doesn't diminish the glamour that clings to the man who turned the question over and look at it, elegantly, upside down.

My music is all about an idealistic human personality. I have 19th-century ideals.

Breathless and unharmed, we emerge from the mazes of metaphysics and psychology where man and the soul are playing hide-and-seek.

By the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes--a transitory Yes if you like, but a Yes.

Dostoevsky gives me more than any scientist, more than Gauss.

Russell Hoban created a tremendous marriage of characters and philosophy. The plots, the wind-up toy characters, the settings, they all work together to support basically a dark vision that the world is kind of a dump. And we all have to find our ways of surviving in it and of making it a better place. It's a world where we don't have much help, other than what we bring to the table. It's a world in which brotherly love counts more than anything else.

All roads are blocked to a philosophy which reduces everything to the word "no." To "no" there is only one answer and that is "yes." Nihilism has no substance. There is no such thing as nothingness, and zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing. Man lives more by affirmation than by bread.

In fact, philosophy is universal in scope. No man can live without a world view; therefore, there is no man who is not a philosopher.

... luckily, Eden is soon populated. The ethical dimension begins when the other appears on the scene.

I don't believe in God. So I'm a non-believer in the non-visible. I'm a believer in us; in humans.

Shakespeare said it best,' Tamaru said quietly as he gazed at that lumpish, misshapen head. 'Something along these lines: if we die today, we do not have to die tomorrow, so let us look to the best in each other

Man is an organ of life, and God alone is life.

We live in the best of all possible worlds

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting - the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

There is no God. But it does not matter. Man is enough.

My humanity is a constant self-overcoming.

Throughout the entire history of philosophy, philosophers have sought to discover what man is - or what human nature is. But Sartre believed that man has no such eternal nature to fall back on. It is therefore useless to search for the meaning of life in general. We are condemned to improvise. We are like actors dragged onto the stage without having learned our lines, with no script and no prompter to whisper stage directions to us. We must decide for ourselves how to live.

What you call man is time.

Philosophy is life's dry-nurse, who can take care of us - but not suckle us.

Where am I? Who am I? How did I come to be here? What is this thing called the world? How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted? And If I am compelled to take part in it, where is the director? I want to see him.

Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret.

God is man idealized.

An atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death.

Man is something that is to be surpassed.

The way to form transcends its own destination, goes beyond the end of the way itself.