The Outsider Quotes

“Blake’s was a complex that involved intellect, emotions and even body. For Blake knew the importance of the body as well as Nietzsche; no poet sings the body so frankly (except perhaps Whitman); for, after all, ‘body is only that portion of soul discerned by the five senses’; body has its place in imagination.

And the function of imagination was to look inward. In ‘Jerusalem’ Blake avowed his intention:

To open the eternal worlds, to open the immortal eyes

Of man Inwards, into the worlds of thought, into Eternity.

Imagination is the instrument of self-knowledge.

But what must be grasped about Blake’s conception is that imagination is not purely emotional or intellectual; for Blake, knowledge involved the whole being, body, emotions, intellect.

Los is only a half of Blake’s picture of man’s inner states. The other half is the strange being called ‘the Spectre’:

Each man is in his spectre’s power

Until the arrival of that hour

When his humanity awakes

And casts his spectre into the lake...

The Spectre is the dead form. He is static consciousness.

Los is kinetic, always pushing, expanding. When life recedes, the limits of its activities seem to be alive, just as the dead body looks like the living one. The Spectre is the dead, conscious part of man that he mistakes for himself, the personality, the habits, the identity. ‘Man is not of fixed or enduring form’ Steppenwolf realized, in a moment of insight. But when man is in ‘the Spectre’s power’ (and most of us are, every day) he sees himself and the whole world as of ‘fixed and enduring form’.

Blake has defined the two worlds of Hanno Buddenbrooks and Steppenwolf: one is the world of Los; the other of the Spectre. The Spectre is invisible, like a shadow, but when he has the ascendancy in man, everything is solid, unchangeable, stagnant, unreal.”
― Colin Wilson, The Outsider

“Urizen is the chief villain always, because Urizen is not merely intellect; he is also personality, identity, the Spectre. As soon as man begins to think, he forms a notion of who he is. If man were entirely body or emotions, he would have no conception of his identity, consequently he could never become unbalanced like Nijinsky, Lawrence, Van Gogh. It is Urizen who starts the trouble. The Bible recounts the same legend when it ascribes the first discord in the universe to Lucifer and his pride”
― Colin Wilson, The Outsider

“There is an Eastern tale that speaks about a very rich magician who had a great many sheep. But at the same time this magician was very mean. He did not want to hire shepherds, nor did he want to erect a fence about the pasture where the sheep were grazing. The sheep consequently often wandered into the forest, fell into ravines and so on, and above all, they ran away, for they knew that the magician wanted their flesh and their skins, and this they did not like.

At last the magician found a remedy. He hypnotized his sheep and suggested to them, first of all, that they were immortal and that no harm was being done to them when they were skinned; that on the contrary, it would be very good for them and even pleasant; secondly he suggested that the magician was a good master who loved his flock so much that he was ready to do anything in the world for them; and in the third place, he suggested that if anything at all were going to happen to them, it was not going to happen just then, at any rate not that day, and therefore they had no need to think about it. Further, the magician suggested to his sheep that they were not sheep at all; to some of them he suggested that they were lions, to some that they were eagles, to some that they were men, to others that they were magicians.

After this all his cares and worries about the sheep came to an end. They never ran away again, but quietly awaited the time when the magician would require their flesh and skins. This tale is a very good illustration of man’s position”
― Colin Wilson, The Outsider

“For the Outsider, the world into which he has been born is always a world without values.. Unless he can evolve a set of values that will correspond to his own higher intensity of purpose, he may as well throw himself under a bus.”
― Colin Wilson, The Outsider

“It is a long way from Mr. Polly’s discovery (If you don’t like your life you can change it) to: There is no way out or round or through.”
― 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. Young W.B. Yeats wanted a fairy land where 'the lonely of heart is withered away.' Dowson and Thompson and Beddoes were 'half in love with easeful death':

They are not long, the days of wine and roses
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.”
― Colin Wilson, The Outsider

“What can be said to characterize the Outsider is a sense of strangeness, of unreality. Even Keats could write, in a letter to Browne just before he died: ‘I feel as if I had died already and am now living a posthumous existence.’ This is the sense of unreality, that can strike out of a perfectly clear sky. Good health and strong nerves can make it unlikely; but that may be only because the man in good health is thinking about other things and doesn’t look in the direction where the uncertainty lies. And once a man has seen it, the world can never afterwards be quite the same straightforward place.”
― Colin Wilson, The Outsider

“He sees too deep and too much’, and what he sees is essentially chaos. For the bourgeois, the world is fundamentally an orderly place, with a disturbing element of the irrational, the terrifying, which his preoccupation with the present usually permits him to ignore. For the Outsider, the world is not rational, not orderly. When he asserts his sense of anarchy in the face of the bourgeois’ complacent acceptance, it is not simply the need to cock a snook at respectability that provokes him;”
― Colin Wilson, The Outsider

“Time like an ever rolling stream bears all its sons away They fly forgotten as a dream dies at the opening day.”
― Colin Wilson, The Outsider

“it is only the species Homo sapiens that is played out. ‘The stars in their courses have turned against him and he has to give place to some other animal better adapted to face the fate that closes in on mankind.’ In the final pages of the pamphlet, his trump of the last judgement has changed into the question: Can civilization be saved?”
― Colin Wilson, The Outsider

“The common mob, the philistines and money changers, are 'flies in the market-place'. Then, as the Outsider's insight becomes deeper, so that he no longer sees men as a million million individuals, but instead sees the world-will that drives them all like ants in a formicary, he knows that they will never escape their stupidity and delusions, that no amount of logic and knowledge can make man any more than an insect; the most irritating of the human lice is the humanist with his puffed-up pride in Reason and his ignorance of his own silliness.”
― Colin Wilson, The Outsider

“Let the Outsider accept without further hesitation: I am different from other men because I have been destined to something greater; let him see himself in the role of predestined poet, predestined prophet or world-betterer, and a half of the Outsider's problems have been solved. What he is saying is, in effect, this: In most men, the instinct of brotherhood with other men is stronger-the herd instinct; in me, a sense of brotherhood with something other than man is strongest, and demands priority. When the Outsider comes to look at other men closely and sympathetically, the hard and fast distinctions break down; he cannot say: I am a poet and they are not, for he soon comes to recognize that no one is entirely a business-man, just as no poet is entirely a poet. He can only say: the sense of purpose that makes me a poet is stronger than theirs. His needle swings to magnetic pole without hesitation; theirs wavers around all the points of the compass and only points north when they come particularly close to the pole, when under the influence of drink or patriotism or sentimentality.”
― Colin Wilson, The Outsider

“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 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, The Outsider

“The deluded vision of personality that our Western civilization fosters and glorifies, increases the inward division; Lawrence recognized it as the enemy. The war against it is therefore inevitably a revolt against Western civilization.”
― Colin Wilson, The Outsider

“The man who is interested to know how he should live instead of merely taking life as it comes, is automatically an Outsider”
― Colin Wilson, The Outsider

“This is the Outsider’s wretchedness, for all men have a herd instinct that leads them to believe that what the majority does must be right.”
― Colin Wilson, The Outsider