"Life itself is an exile. The way home is not the way back."
"Now the basic impulse behind existentialism is optimistic, very much like the impulse behind all science. Existentialism is romanticism, and romanticism is the feeling that man is not the mere he has always taken himself for. Romanticism began as a tremendous surge of optimism about the stature of man. Its aim - like that of science - was to raise man above the muddled feelings and impulses of his everyday humanity, and to make him a god-like observer of human existence."
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Source: Introduction to the New Existentialism. Book by Colin Wilson, p. 96, 1966.
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More quotes by Colin Wilson
"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."