# Quote — Colin Wilson, The Outsider

> Considered as a whole, Hesse's achievement can hardly be matched in modern literature; it is the continually rising trajectory of an idea, the fundamentally religious idea of how to 'live more abundantly'. Hesse has little imagination in the sense that Shakespeare or Tolstoy can be said to have imagination, but his ideas have a vitality that more than makes up for it. Before all, he is a novelist who used the novel to explore the problem: What should we do with our lives? The man who is interested to know how he should live instead of merely taking life as it comes, is automatically an Outsider.

- Author: [Colin Wilson](https://www.leafyquotes.com/colin-wilson.md)
- Book: [The Outsider](https://www.leafyquotes.com/colin-wilson/the-outsider.md)
- Page: 77
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Colin_Wilson#The_Outsider_(1956)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/colin-wilson/the-outsider/considered-as-a-whole

## More from this book

> There is in Shaw, as in Gurdjieff and Nietzsche, a recognition of the immense effort of Will that is necessary to express even a little freedom, that places them beside Pascal and St. Augustine as religious thinkers. Their view is saved from pessimism only by its mystical recognition of the possibilities of pure Will, freed from the entanglements of automatism.

p. 292 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/colin-wilson/the-outsider/there-is-in-shaw.md)

> Cézanne's painting is strictly painting, and its value is immense; but Van Gogh's painting has the Outsider's characteristic: it is a laboratory refuse of a man who treated his own life as an experiment in living; it faithfully records moods and developments of vision on the manner of a Bildungsroman.

p. 103 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/colin-wilson/the-outsider/cezannes-painting-is-strictly.md)

> 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.

p. 231 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/colin-wilson/the-outsider/the-exploration-of-oneself.md)