"The complex develops out of the simple"
About this Quote
“The complex develops out of the simple” sounds like a calm, almost managerial reassurance, but Colin Wilson is doing something more provocative: he’s smuggling an entire philosophy of mind and culture into a sentence that refuses to posture. Wilson, the outsider-turned-pop-intellectual behind The Outsider, spent his career arguing that modern life trains us to mistake complexity for depth and complication for truth. This line flips that reflex. It insists that complexity isn’t a starting point, it’s a consequence.
The intent is partly methodological. Wilson is speaking to the writer, the thinker, the spiritual striver: stop building baroque systems to feel intelligent; return to first principles, basic experiences, elemental questions. In his orbit, “the simple” isn’t simplistic. It’s the raw, pre-theoretical material of consciousness - attention, purpose, desire, dread. Get those right and the “complex” will arrive naturally, like a city growing from a crossroads.
The subtext is a critique of fashionable obscurity. Wilson’s era (postwar Britain, existentialism filtered through mass media, academia professionalizing doubt) rewarded the performance of difficulty. His sentence offers a counter-aesthetic: clarity as courage. It also carries a quiet ethical wager. If complexity truly grows out of simplicity, then the task isn’t to dominate the world with elaborate explanations, but to refine perception until the world’s intricacy reveals itself.
It works because it’s both an invitation and a rebuke: your confusion may be self-inflicted, your sophistication possibly defensive. Start small, and the big questions stop being decoration and become architecture.
The intent is partly methodological. Wilson is speaking to the writer, the thinker, the spiritual striver: stop building baroque systems to feel intelligent; return to first principles, basic experiences, elemental questions. In his orbit, “the simple” isn’t simplistic. It’s the raw, pre-theoretical material of consciousness - attention, purpose, desire, dread. Get those right and the “complex” will arrive naturally, like a city growing from a crossroads.
The subtext is a critique of fashionable obscurity. Wilson’s era (postwar Britain, existentialism filtered through mass media, academia professionalizing doubt) rewarded the performance of difficulty. His sentence offers a counter-aesthetic: clarity as courage. It also carries a quiet ethical wager. If complexity truly grows out of simplicity, then the task isn’t to dominate the world with elaborate explanations, but to refine perception until the world’s intricacy reveals itself.
It works because it’s both an invitation and a rebuke: your confusion may be self-inflicted, your sophistication possibly defensive. Start small, and the big questions stop being decoration and become architecture.
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Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Wilson, Colin. (2026, January 17). The complex develops out of the simple. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-complex-develops-out-of-the-simple-53592/
Chicago Style
Wilson, Colin. "The complex develops out of the simple." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-complex-develops-out-of-the-simple-53592/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"The complex develops out of the simple." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-complex-develops-out-of-the-simple-53592/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.
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