Quotes from The Outsider

“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.”
― Colin Wilson, quote from 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, quote from 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.”
― Colin Wilson, quote from 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, quote from The Outsider

“كيف يستطيع الإنسان أن يكون أقوى ؟ كيف يستطيع أن يقلل من عبوديته للظروف ؟”
― Colin Wilson, quote from 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, quote from 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 ينبذ 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...”
― Colin Wilson, quote from The Outsider

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

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

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

“أما ستراود فانه 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 .”
― Colin Wilson, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from The Outsider

“Never, until these last few days, had I understood the meaning of existence. I was like the others…I said with them: The ocean is green, that white speck up there is a seagull, but I didn’t feel that it existed…And then suddenly existence had unveiled itself.”
― Colin Wilson, quote from 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, quote from The Outsider

“But the problem for the individual always will be the opposite of this, the conscious striving not to limit the amount of experience seen and touched; the intolerable struggle to expose the sensitive areas of being to what may possibly hurt them; the attempt to see as a whole, although the instinct of self-preservation fights against the pain of the internal widening, and all the impulses of spiritual laziness build into waves of sleep with every new effort. The individual begins that long effort as an Outsider; he may finish it as a saint.”
― Colin Wilson, quote from The Outsider

“It was an extremely hard and discouraging business, for I knew no one whose interests overlapped with mine. I married when I was nineteen, and a wife and child added to the problems. But at least it meant that I got used to working completely and totally alone, and not expecting encouragement. Later on, reviewers and critics were outraged by what one of them called “his stupefying assurance about his own genius.” But it would have been impossible to go on working without some conviction of genius—at least, of certainty about the importance of what I was doing, and the belief that it wouldn’t matter if no other human being ever came to share this certainty. The feeling of alienation had to be totally accepted. Luckily, I’ve always had a fairly cheerful temperament, not much given to self-pity. So I went on working, reading and writing in my total vacuum, without contact with any other writer or thinker. I”
― Colin Wilson, quote from The Outsider

“It seemed to me that a solution must be found. Here, my natural optimism was to my advantage. For when I read Sartre or Camus or Graham Greene, I experienced a temperamental rejection of their pessimism. I suspected that their ultimate picture might be distorted by a certain self-pity or lack of discipline—or, in the case of Greene, by a certain congenital lack of vitality. I suspected that if the problem left them defeated, it was because they had not attacked it hard enough.”
― Colin Wilson, quote from The Outsider

“In his embryonic form, as the Outsider, he does not know himself well enough to understand the driving force behind his feelings. That is why his chief concern is with thinking, not with doing.”
― Colin Wilson, quote from The Outsider

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Popular quotes

“For man to be worthy of any rank, he must strive first to be a man.”
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― Dante Alighieri, quote from Vita Nuova

“How ... how fragile situations are. But not tenuous. Delicate, but not flimsy, not indulgent. Delicate, that's why they keep breaking, they must break and you must get the pieces together and show it before it breaks again, or put them aside for a moment when something else breaks and turn to that, and all this keeps going on. That's why most writing now, if you read it they go on one two three four and tell you what happened like newspaper accounts, no adjectives, no long sentences, no tricks they pretend, and they finally believe that they really believe that the way they saw it is the way it is ... it never takes your breath away, telling you things you already know, laying everything out flat, as though the terms and the time, and the nature and the movement of everything were secrets of the same magnitude. They write for people who read with the surface of their minds, people with reading habits that make the smallest demands on them, people brought up reading for facts, who know what's going to come next and want to know what's coming next, and get angry at surprises. Clarity's essential, and detail, no fake mysticism, the facts are bad enough. But we're embarrassed for people who tell too much, and tell it without surprise. How does he know what happened? unless it's one unshaven man alone in a boat, changing I to he, and how often do you get a man alone in a boat, in all this ... all this ... Listen, there are so many delicate fixtures, moving toward you, you'll see. Like a man going into a dark room, holding his hands down guarding his parts for fear of a table corner, and ... Why, all this around us is for people who can keep their balance only in the light, where they move as though nothing were fragile, nothing tempered by possibility, and all of a sudden bang! something breaks. Then you have to stop and put the pieces together again. But you never can put them back together quite the same way. You stop when you can and expose things, and leave them within reach, and others come on by themselves, and they break, and even then you may put the pieces aside just out of reach until you can bring them back and show them, put together slightly different, maybe a little more enduring, until you've broken it and picked up the pieces enough times, and you have the whole thing in all its dimensions. But the discipline, the detail, it's just ... sometimes the accumulation is too much to bear.”
― William Gaddis, quote from The Recognitions

“He is quiet and small, he is black
From his ears to the tip of his tail;
He can creep through the tiniest crack
He can walk on the narrowest rail.
He can pick any card from a pack,
He is equally cunning with dice;
He is always deceiving you into believing
That he's only hunting for mice.
He can play any trick with a cork
Or a spoon and a bit of fish-paste;
If you look for a knife or a fork
And you think it is merely misplaced -
You have seen it one moment, and then it is gawn!
But you'll find it next week lying out on the lawn.
And we all say: OH!
Well I never!
Was there ever
A Cat so clever
As Magical Mr. Mistoffelees!”
― T.S. Eliot, quote from Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats

“But politeness and candour run together, when one is not fitting neither is the other. Then the occasion calls for silence, that frail partition between the ill-concealed and the ill-revealed, the clumsily false and the unavoidably so.”
― Samuel Beckett, quote from Murphy

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