The Outsider (Wilson book)  

"I recalled a novel I had once read about, in which a man had spent his days peering through a hole in the wall of his hotel room, at the life that comes and goes next door."--The Outsider (1956) by Colin Wilson

"But for a hundred years or more, Outsiders have been swinging the hammer, without consciously realizing what they were doing, and slowly creating new values by implication. Forty years after Hulme's death, we can begin to see the results of the hundred years of intellectual questioning. Hulme regarded his Speculations as a preface to Pascal's Pensees, but it would perhaps be more accurate to regard them as the epilogue of a certain indispensable body of Outsider literature, beginning with Dostoevsky's Notes from Under the Floorboards and including Steppenwolf, The Secret Life, Nijinsky's Diary and Mind at the End of Its Tether."--The Outsider (1956) by Colin Wilson

"Compared with Sartre, neither Hemingway nor Camus is a penetrating thinker. Camus's Mythe de Sisyphe enlarges on the conclusions of the last pages of L'Etranger, and concludes that freedom can be most nearly realized facing death: a suicide or a condemned man can know it; for the living, active man it is almost an impossibility. In the later book, L'Homme Revolte, he studies the case of the revolt against society, in men like de Sade and Byron, and then examines the attempt of various social ideologies to realize the rebel's ideal of freedom."--The Outsider (1956) by Colin Wilson

"If The Outsider was an unprecedented success, my next book, Religion and the Rebel, was an unprecedented failure. The highbrow critics seized the opportunity to go back on their praise of The Outsider. And the popular Press joined in like a gang of Indians invited to a massacre. Time, with its usual awe-inspiring vulgarity, ran a kind of obituary on me headed 'Scrambled Egghead'.--The Outsider (1956) by Colin Wilson

"This is the problem of the Outsider. We shall encounter it under many different forms in the course of this book: on a metaphysical level, with Sartre and Camus (where it is called Existentialism), on a religious level, with Boehme and Kierkegaard; even on a criminal level, with Dostoevsky's Stavrogin."--The Outsider (1956) by Colin Wilson

"In this connexion, too, we might mention many writers of the nineteenth century, especially of its last three decades; and the poets Yeats called 'the tragic generation': Lionel Johnson, Dowson, Verlaine, Corbiere, men who are the tail-end of nineteenth-century romanticism; and their immediate forebears, Baudelaire, Mallarme, Lautreamont and the Italian Leopardi. James Thomson's 'City of Dreadful Night' deserves more space than we can afford to give it here, as being a sort of nineteenth-century forerunner of T. S. Eliot's 'Waste Land', with its insistence on the illusory nature of the world."--The Outsider (1956) by Colin Wilson

"The symbolism here is plain enough: literal thinking perverts the inspired truths of religion into superstitions. And Blake's accusation, hurled at the whole world, is that it thinks literally. Blake's particular bugbears were the rationalists and the 'natural-religionists', Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau, and the scientists Priestley and Newton. (Modern counterparts of these would be the Secular Society, or thinkers like Dewey and Russell.) Such men, Blake swore, were 'villains and footpads', men subjugated to the woman's literal way of thinking."--The Outsider (1956) by Colin Wilson

"It is interesting to compare this with Poe's description of the feelings of a convalescent at the beginning of his "Man of the Crowd": , '... and, with returning strength, found myself in one of those happy moods which are so precisely the converse of ennui, moments of the keenest appetancy when the film from the mental vision departs and the intellect, electrified, surpasses its everyday condition Merely to breathe was enjoyment....' Poe's hero is also seated in a London cafe, watching the crowds."--The Outsider (1956) by Colin Wilson

"Young Werther brought about a change of heart. Schiller's Robbers and Don Carlos followed. (Nietzsche somewhere quotes a German military man as saying: 'If God had foreseen the Robbers he would not have created the world' - to such an extent does it set up the humanistic standard and discredit the divine.) There was Novalis, scientist and romantic, who created Heinrich von Ofterdingen, the poet predestined from birth for a high destiny of singing. In England, German romanticism was introduced when Coleridge translated Schiller and Byron published 'Childe Harold'."--The Outsider (1956) by Colin Wilson