Colin Wilson Quotes

The more we try to live in the world of words, the more we feel isolated and alone, the more all the joy and liveliness of things is exchanged for mere certainty and security. On the other hand, the more we are forced to admit that we actually live in the real world, the more we feel ignorant, uncertain, and insecure about everything.

Initially, I studied philosophy, because it claimed to give you answers to the meaning of existence, but it didn't: It was basically a semantics game.

I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.

Will our life not be a tunnel between two vague clarities? Or will it not be a clarity between two dark triangles?

I secretly think reality exists so we can speculate about it.

From my undergraduate days, I've always been interested in the major philosophical questions that don't seem to have an answer that everyone agrees on.

It is good a philosopher should remind himself, now and then, that he is a particle pontificating on infinity.

Philosophy is an attempt by man to find cause and effect. Religion has the same goal.

Philosophy, most broadly viewed, is the critical survey of existence from the standpoint of value.

What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.

I think Poe had a mission to tell us what it's all about. To answer some of the great questions of life.

Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.

The two basic topics which fascinate me are 'What is reality?' and 'What constitutes the authentic human being?'

Quite early on, and certainly since I started writing, I found that philosophical questions occupied me more than any other kind. I hadn't really thought of them as being philosophical questions, but one rapidly comes to an understanding that philosophy's only really about two questions: 'What is true?' and 'What is good?'

How do we describe the fact of human existence? At a certain point, perhaps, style fails us. Language, even and in particular at its most evocative, becomes less of an aid and more of a difficulty.

Man never ceases to seek knowledge about the objects of his experiences, to understand their meaning for his existence and to react to them according to his understanding. Finally, out of the sum total of the meanings that he has deduced from his contacts with numerous single objects of his environment there grows a unified view of the world into which he finds himself "thrown" (to use an existentialist term again) and this view is of the third order.

As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it.

What is an "I", and why are such things found (at least so far) only in association with, as poet Russell Edson once wonderfully phrased it, "teetering bulbs of dread and dream" - that is, only in association with certain kinds of gooey lumps encased in hard protective shells mounted atop mobile pedestals that roam the world on pairs of slightly fuzzy, jointed stilts?

Mann was profoundly influenced by two philosophers, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, who returned to the most ancient of all philosophical questions - "How to live?" - and whose writings offered novel perspectives for considering that question (much more perspective-offering than rigorous argument!)

The meaning of life consists in the fact that it makes no sense to say that life has no meaning.

Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.

Coleridge cried; "O God, how glorious it is to live!" Renan asks, "O God, when will it be worth while to live?" In Nature we echo the poet; in the world we echo the thinker.

Life, what is it but a dream?

What is the real question is not whether to be, but how to be?