The Outsider

The exploration of oneself is usually also an exploration of the world at large, of other writers, a process of comparison with oneself with others, discoveries of kinships, gradual illumination of one's own potentialities.

The self-surmounter can never put up with the man who has ceased to be dissatisfied with himself.

Most men have nothing in their heads but their physical needs; put them on a desert island with nothing to occupy their minds and they would go insane. They lack real motive. The curse of civilization is boredom.

The real issue is not whether two and two make four or whether two and two make five, but whether life advances by men who love words or men who love living.

Self-expression is impossible in relation with other men; their self-expression interferes with it. The greatest heights of self-expression in poetry, music, painting – are achieved by men who are supremely alone.

Art is thought, and thought only gives the world an appearance of order to anyone weak enough to be convinced by its show.

Man is as much a slave to his immediate surroundings now as he was when he lived in tree-huts. Give him the highest, the most exciting thoughts about man's place in the universe, the meaning of history; they can all be snuffed out in a moment if he wants his dinner, or feels irritated by a child squalling on a bus. He is bound by pettiness.

It is not enough to accept a concept of order and live by it; that is cowardice, and such cowardice cannot result from freedom. Chaos must be faced. Real order must be preceded by a descent into chaos.

In refusing to face evil, Sinclair has gained nothing and lost a great deal; the Buddhist scripture expenses it: those who refuse to discriminate might as well be dead.

He alone is aware of the truth, and if all men were aware of it, there would be an end of life. In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. But his kingship is kingship over nothing. It brings no powers and privileges, only loss of faith and exhaustion of the power to act. Its world is a world without values.

Humanism is only another name for spiritual laziness, or a vague half-creed adopted by men of science and logicians whose heads are too occupied with the world of mathematics and physics to worry about religious categories.

This is the Outsider's extremity. He does not prefer not to believe; he doesn't like feeling that futility gets the last word in the universe; his human nature would like to find something it can answer to with complete assent. But honesty prevents his accepting a solution that he cannot reason about.

The Outsider is always unhappy, but he is an agent that ensures the happiness for millions of 'Insiders'.