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The Outsider’s case against society is very clear. All men and women have these dangerous, unnamable impulses, yet they keep up a pretense, to themselves, to others; their respectability, their philosophy, their religion, are all attempts to gloss over, to make civilized and rational something that is savage, unorganized, irrational. He is an Outsider because he stands for truth.

— Colin Wilson The Outsider (1956)

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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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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.