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A child might be overawed by a great city, but a civil engineer knows that he might demolish it and rebuild it himself. Husserl's philosophy has the same aim: to show us that, although we may have been thrust into this world without a 'by your leave,' we are mistaken to assume that it exists independently of us. It is true that reality exists apart from us; but what we mistake for the world is actually a world constituted by us, selected from an infinitely complex reality.

— Colin Wilson Introduction to the New Existentialism (1966)

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Mathematics

More quotes by Colin Wilson

I had never doubted my own abilities, but I was quite prepared to believe that "the world" would decline to recognize them.

Postscript to the Outsider (1967)

What can characterize the Outsider is a sense of strangeness, or unreality.

The Outsider (1956)

The "passion for incredulity" can produce as much self-deception as the uncritical will to believe.

Art is naturally concerned with man in his existential aspect, not in his scientific aspect.

The Strength To Dream (1961)

Faculty X is simply that latent power in human beings possess to reach beyond the present.

The Occult: A History (1971)

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Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

Kenneth Boulding to Kenneth Boulding in: United States. Congress. House (1973)

If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: infinite.

William Blake The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790)

Pure mathematics consists entirely of assertions to the effect that, if such and such a proposition is true of anything, then such and such another proposition is true of that thing.

Bertrand Russell

The land of easy mathematics where he who works adds up and he who retires subtracts.

Núria Añó

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Colin Wilson (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.