The Outsider Quotes

“نرى في "الحياة السرية" أن اللامنتمي منفصل عن الآخرين بذكائه الذي يحطم قيم الآخرين بلا رحمة، ويمنعه عن التعبير الذاتي (فرض نفسه) لعدم استطاعته استبدال تلك القيم بقيم جديدة، فمشكلته إذن هي مشكلة ايكليزياستس: لا شيء يستحق بذل أي مجهود.”
― كولن ولسون, The Outsider

“The outsider is not sure who he is. He has found an “I”, but it is not his true “I”.’ His main business is to find his way back to himself.”
― Colin Wilson, The Outsider

“Ask the Outsider what he ultimately wants,and he will admit he doesn't know.Why? Because he wants it instinctively,and it is not always possible to tell what your instincts are driving towards.”
― Colin Wilson, The Outsider

“These men are in prison: that is the Outsider’s verdict. They are quite contented in prison—caged animals who have never known freedom; but it is prison all the same. And the Outsider? He is in prison too: nearly every Outsider in this book has told us so in a different language; but he knows it. His desire is to escape. But a prison-break is not an easy matter; you must know all about your prison, otherwise you might spend years in tunnelling, like the Abbe in The Count of Monte Cristo, and only find yourself in the next cell.”
― Colin Wilson, The Outsider

“إن مشكلة اللامنتمي ليست جديدة، ذلك لأن لورنس يلفت نظرنا إلى أن تاريخ الأنبياء يتبع نموذجاً معيناً، فيولد النبي وسط الحضارة، ويرفض مقاييسها عن الوجود المادي الممتاز، ويعود إلى الصحراء.ثم يعود ليبشر بنبذ العالم، بالشدة الروحية ضد الطمأنينة الجسدية.
شقاء اللامنتمي إذن هو شقاء الأنبياء، إنه ينسحب من غرفته كالعنكبوت في الزوايا المظلمة، ويعيش وحيداً، راغباً عن الناس.”
― كولن ولسون, The Outsider

“كيف يستطيع الإنسان أن يكون أقوى ؟ كيف يستطيع أن يقلل من عبوديته للظروف ؟”
― كولن ولسون, The Outsider

“- الحيا ة منفى بحد ذاتها. العودة الى البيت ليس هو طريق الرجعة.”
― كولن ولسون, The Outsider

“وضع برنارد شو إصبعه على الحاجة الحقيقية في مقدمة "العودة إلى ميتوشالح" :
"دع الكنائس تسأل أنفسها: لماذا لا تحدث ثورة ضد قوانين الرياضيات كما تحدث ضد الدين؟ ليس ذلك لأن قوانين الرياضيات مفهومة أكثر. إن قانون إكمال المربع هو غير مفهوم بالنسبة للإنسان العادي تماماً كما لايفهم هذا الإنسان نفسه العقيدة "الاثانيزية"، وليس هذا لأن العلم خال من السحر والأساطير والمعجزات وتواريخ الحياة التي يفاخر بها "الأصدقاء" ببطولاتهم وقدسياتهم، ومن التافهين والفارغين الذين يدعون بأنهم مكتشفون، بل على العكس، فإن تصورات وقدسيات العلم كبيرة جداً وحقيرة بقدر كثرتها.
إلا أن طالب العلوم لم يتعلم أن قانون الوزن النوعي يتألف من الاعتقاد بأن أرخميدس قفز من الحمام وركض عارياً في شوارع سيراكوز صائحاً: وجدتها وجدتها، أو أن قانون إكمال المربع يجب أن ين��ذ إذا استطاع أحد أن يثبت أن نيوتن لم يدخل بستاناً في حياته...
إننا نجد في الرياضيات والفيزياء أن الإيمان مايزال نقياً، وبإمكانك أن تتمسك بالقانون وتترك الأساطير دون أن يتهمك أحد بالهرطقة...”
― كولن ولسون, The Outsider

“Some are perfectly satisfied with what they have; they eat, drink, impregnate their wives, and take life as it comes. Others can never forget that they are being cheated; that life tempts them to struggle by offering them the essence of sex, of beauty, of success; and that she always seems to pay in counterfeit money.”
― Colin Wilson, The Outsider

“The Outsider is always unhappy, but he is the agent that ensures happiness for millions of ‘Insiders’.”
― Colin Wilson, The Outsider

“انه يقود إلى ادراك أن الإنسان ليس كائناَ ثابتاَ غير متبدل .. انه شخص ما في يوم ما , و هو شخص ىخر في يوم آخر , انه ينسى بسهولة و يعيش في لحظته , و نادراَ ما يمارس قوة الارادة و حتى اذا فعل , فإنه يستسلم بسرعة , إذ انه ينسى هدفه الاصلي و يتحول عنه إلى هدف آخر”
― كولن ولسون, The Outsider

“- الحيا ة منفى بحد ذاتها. العودة الى البيت ليس هو طريق الرجعة.”
― Colin Wilson, The Outsider

“There is in Shaw, as in Gurdjieff and Nietzsche, a recognition of the immense effort of Will that is necessary to express even a little freedom, that places them beside Pascal and St. Augustine as religious thinkers. Their view is saved from pessimism only by its mystical recognition of the possibilities of pure Will, freed from the entanglements of automatism”
― Colin Wilson, The Outsider

“أما اللامنتمي فإنه لا يرى العالم معقولا ولا يراه منظما، وحين يقذف بمعانيه الفوضوية في وجه دعة البرجوازي، فليس ذلك لأنه يشعر بالرغبة في قذف معاني الاحترام بإهانة لإثارتها، وإنما لأنه يحس بشعور يبعث على الكآبة، شعور بأن الحقيقة يجب أن تقال مهما كلف الأمر، وإلا فلن يكون الإصلاح ممكنا”
― كولن ولسون, The Outsider

“لا شئ أسهل من نيل مثل هذا النجاح اذا كان يشتهيه المرء .. الا ان ايفان انطلق إلى أبعد من كل الخدع المعروفة .. إلى قلب الأشياء .. فهل كان ذلك القلب ميتاَ كالحجارة الصلدة ؟ الا يجرؤ المرء أن يقول ذلك حين يكتشفه ؟”
― كولن ولسون, The Outsider

“The Outsider is he who cannot accept life as it is, who cannot consider his own existence or anyone else’s necessary. He sees ‘too deep and too much’.”
― Colin Wilson, The Outsider

“If you say that everything—chaos, darkness, anathema— can be reduced to mathematical formulae—then man will go insane on purpose to have no judgement, and to behave as he likes. I believe this because it appears that man’s whole business is to prove that he is a man and not a cog-wheel... And perhaps, who knows, the striving of man on earth may consist in this uninterrupted striving for something ahead, that is, in life itself rather than some real end which obviously must be a static formula of the same kind as two and two make four—I am sure that man will never renounce the genuine suffering that comes of ruin and chaos. Why, suffering is the one and only source of knowledge”
― Colin Wilson, The Outsider

“It leads to a realization that man is not a constant, unchanging being: he is one person one day, another person the next. He forgets easily, lives in the moment, seldom exerts will-power, and even when he does, gives up the effort after a short time, or forgets his original aim and turns to something else. No wonder that poets feel such despair when they seem to catch a glimpse of some intenser state of consciousness, and know with absolute certainty that nothing they can do can hold it fast. And this theme, implicit in Sartre, Camus, Hemingway, and even more explicit in writers like T. S. Eliot and Aldous Huxley, leads to a question, ‘How can man be stronger? How can he be less of a slave of circumstances?”
― Colin Wilson, The Outsider

“The vitality of the ordinary members of society is dependent on its Outsiders. Many Outsiders unify themselves, realize themselves as poets or saints. Others remain tragically divided and unproductive, but even they supply soul-energy to society; it is their strenuousness that purifies thought and prevents the bourgeois world from foundering under its own dead-weight; they are society’s spiritual dynamos.”
― Colin Wilson, The Outsider

“أما ستراود ��انه لم يتخل عن طموحه من أجل حياة الدرجة الاولى , و انما فضل ان لا يفعل شيئاََ حين لاح له ان الحصول على تلك الحياة صعب المنال .”
― كولن ولسون, The Outsider

“Freedom posits free-will; that is self-evident. But Will can only operate when there is first a motive. No motive, no willing. But motive is a matter of belief; you would not want to do anything unless you believed it possible and meaningful. And belief must be belief in the existence of something; that is to say, it concerns what is real. So ultimately, freedom depends upon the real. The Outsider’s sense of unreality cuts off his freedom at the root. It is as impossible to exercise freedom in an unreal world as it is to jump while you are falling.”
― Colin Wilson, The Outsider

“The civilized man and the wolf-man live at enmity most of the time, and it would seem that Harry Haller is bound to spend his days divided by their squabbling. But sometimes, as in the tavern, they make peace, and then a strange state ensues; for Harry finds that a combination of the two makes him akin to the gods. In these moments of vision, he is no longer envious of the bourgeois who finds life so straightforward, for his own conflicts are present in the bourgeois, on a much smaller scale. He, as self-realizer, has deliberately cultivated his two opposing natures until the conflict threatens to tear him in two, because he knows that when he has achieved the secret of permanently reconciling them, he will live at a level of intensity unknown to the bourgeois. His suffering is not a mark of his inferiority, even though it may render him less fit for survival than the bourgeois; unreconciled, it is the sign of his greatness; reconciled, it is manifested as ‘more abundant life’ that makes the Outsider’s superiority over other types of men unquestionable. When the Outsider becomes aware of his strength, he is unified and happy. Haller”
― Colin Wilson, The Outsider

“At the same time, it is necessary to bear in mind Hesse’s recognition that, strictly speaking, there is no such thing as man; ‘Man is a bourgeois compromise.’ The primitive religious notion of man’s relation to his creator collapses under the Outsider’s criticism. The Outsider’s wretchedness lies in his inability to find a new faith; he tends to regard his condition of unbelief as the result of a Fall. ^ This is the essential Van Gogh; not a painter, but an Outsider, for whom life is an acute and painful question that demands solution before he begins living. His earliest experiences teach him that life is an eternal Pro and Contra. His sensitivity makes him unusually aware of the Contra, of his own misery and the world’s. All his faculties are exerted in a search for the Pro, for instinctive, absolute Yea-saying. Like all artists, he has moments when he seems to be in complete accord with the universe and himself, when, like Meursault, he feels that the universe and himself are of the same nature; then all life seems purposive, and his own miseries purposive. The rest of the time is a struggle to regain that insight. If there is an order in the universe, if he can sometimes perceive that order and feel himself completely in accord with it, then it must be seeable, touchable, so that it could be regained by some discipline. Art is only one form of such a discipline.”
― Colin Wilson, The Outsider

“انهم يغيرون قمصانهم يومياً, الا انهم لا يغيرون من مفهوم أنفسهم بالنسبة اليهم شيئاً”
― كولن ولسون, The Outsider

“ان هؤلاء الناس مسجونون, و انهم قانعون بسجنهم - كالحيوانات المحبوسة في أقفاصها و التي لم تذُق طعم الحرية يوماً.”
― كولن ولسون, The Outsider

“i like hunchbacks and other freaks. I am myself a freak who has feelings and sensitiveness, and I can dance like a hunchback. I am an artist who likes all shapes and all beauty.”
― Colin Wilson, The Outsider

“The real difference between the Marxian and the romantic Outsider is that one would like to bring heaven down to earth, the other dreams of raising earth up to heaven. To the Outsider, the Marxian seems hopelessly short-sighted in his requirements for a heaven on earth; his notions seem to be based on a total failure to understand human psychology. (Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Zamyatin’s We are typical expressions of Outsider criticism of social idealism.) Now George Fox combined the practical-mindedness of the Marxian with the Outsider’s high standard for a ‘heaven on earth’, and in so far as he was practical-minded, he failed to penetrate to the bottom of the Outsider’s ideal. What did he achieve? He founded the Society of Friends, a very fine thing in itself, but lacking the wearing-quality of older established sects; he conquered his Outsider’s sense of exile. And there we have it! As a religious teacher, he accepted himself and the world, and no Outsider can afford to do this. He accepted an essentially optimistic philosophy.”
― Colin Wilson, The Outsider

“I love life and I want to live, to cry but cannot—I feel such a pain in my soul—a pain which frightens me. My soul is ill. My soul, not my mind. The doctors do not understand my illness.... Everybody who reads these lines will suffer.... My body is not ill, it is my soul that is ill.”
― Colin Wilson, The Outsider

“Yet it is the Outsider’s belief that life aims at more life, at higher forms of life, something for which the Superman is an inexact poetic symbol (as Dante’s description of the beatific vision is expressed in terms of a poetic symbol); so that, in a sense, Urizen is the most important of the three functions. The fall was necessary, as Hesse realized. Urizen must go forward alone.
The other two must follow him. And as soon as Urizen has gone forward, the Fall has taken place. Evolution towards God is impossible without a Fall. And it is only by this recognition that the poet can ever come to ‘praise in spite of; for if evil is ultimately discord, unresolvable, then the idea of dennoch preisen is a self-contradiction. And yet it must be clearly recognized and underlined that this is not the Hegelian ‘God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world’. Even if the evil is necessary, it remains evil, discord, pain. It remains an Existential fact, not something that proves to be
something else when you hold it in the right light. It is as if there were two opposing armies:
the Hegelian view holds that peace can be secured by proving that there is really no ground for
opposition; in short, they are really friends. The Blakeian view says that the discord is necessary,
but it can never be resolved until one army has. completely exterminated the other. This is the
Existential view, first expressed by Soren Kierkegaard, the Outsider’s view and, incidentally,
the religious view. The whole difference between the Existentialist and the Hegelian viewpoint
is implicit in the comparison between the title of Hegel’s book, The Philosophy of History, and James Joyce’s phrase, ‘History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’ Blake provided the Existentialist view with a symbolism and mythology. In Blake’s view, harmony is an ultimate aim, but not the primary aim, of life; the primary aim is to live more abundantly at any cost. Harmony can come later.”
― Colin Wilson, The Outsider

“the final revelation comes when you look at these City-men on the train; for you realize that for them, the business of escaping is complicated by the fact that they think they are the prison. An astounding situation! Imagine a large castle on an island, with almost inescapable dungeons. The jailor has installed every device to prevent the prisoners escaping, and he has taken one final precaution: that of hypnotizing the prisoners, and then suggesting to them that they and the prison are one. When one of the prisoners awakes to the fact that he would like to be free, and suggests this to his fellow prisoners, they look at him with surprise and say: Tree from what? We are the castle.’ What a situation!”
― Colin Wilson, The Outsider