"Life itself is an exile. The way home is not the way back."
"Now individual consciousness, as typified in human beings, has great advantages and great disadvantages. Individuality means a narrowing, and narrowness can be useful. It is good for close-up work. We have invented the magnifying glass and the microscope to narrow our vision, because narrowness makes for precision. But narrowness also makes for a failure of purpose, for exhaustion of the will; for purpose depends upon a broad vision, a clear sight of one's objective."
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Source: Colin Wilson (1971). “The Occult: A History”, Vintage
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"The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain."
"If you can train your senses to perceive the movement of the minute hand of a clock, what is to stop you for training them to 'slow down' when you look at a tree or a puddle?"
"Imagination should be used, not to escape reality but to create it."
"Isaiah Berlin once said that there are two kinds of writers, hedgehogs and foxes. He said the fox knows many things, the hedgehog knows just one thing. So Shakespeare is a typical fox; Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky are typical hedgehogs. Now, I'm a typical hedgehog. I know just one thing, and I repeat it over and over again. I try to approach it from different angles to make it look different, but it's the same thing."
"Turning on the light is easy if you know where the switch is."