Top 100 Arthur Koestler Quotes
#1. The most persistent sound which reverberates through man's history is the beating of war drums.
Arthur Koestler
#2. [My father] loved me tenderly and shyly from a distance, and later on took a naive pride in seeing my name in print.
Arthur Koestler
#3. Perhaps he did not know himself - like all these intellectual cynics ...
Arthur Koestler
#4. In my youth I regarded the Universe as an open book, printed in the language of physical equations, whereas now it appears to me as a text written in invisible ink, of which, in our rare moments of grace, we are able to decipher a small fragment.
Arthur Koestler
#5. The real achievement in discoveries ... is seeing an analogy where no one saw one before.. The essence of discovery is that unlikely marriage of ... previously unrelated forms of reference or universes of discourse, whose union will solve the previously insoluble problem.
Arthur Koestler
#6. The 'gallows' are not only a symbol of death, but also a symbol of cruelty, terror and irreverence for life; the common denominator of primitive savagery, medieval fanaticism and modern totalitarianism.
Arthur Koestler
#7. and there was only one revolutionary virtue which he had not learned, the virtue of self-deception
Arthur Koestler
#8. The principle that the end justifies the means is and remains the only rule of political ethics; anything else is just a vague chatter and melts away between one's fingers.
Arthur Koestler
#9. Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history; at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that the end justifies the means.
Arthur Koestler
#10. A writer's ambition should be to trade a hundred contemporary readers for ten readers in ten years' time and for one reader in a hundred years' time.
Arthur Koestler
#11. The arbitrary power of the Government is unlimited, and unexampled in history; freedom of the Press, of opinion and of movement are as thoroughly exterminated as though the proclamation of the Rights of Man had never been.
Arthur Koestler
#12. Laughter and weeping, the Greek masks of comedy and tragedy, mark the extremes of a continuous spectrum; both provide channels for the overflow of emotion; both are
Arthur Koestler
#13. If power corrupts, the reverse is also true; persecution corrupts the victims though perhaps in subtler and more tragic ways.
Arthur Koestler
#14. The progress of science is strewn, like an ancient desert trail, with the bleached skeleton of discarded theories which once seemed to possess eternal life.
Arthur Koestler
#15. Coincidence may be described as the chance encounter of two unrelated causal chains which
Arthur Koestler
#16. Innovation is a twofold threat to academic mediocrities: it endangers their oracular authority, and it evokes the deeper fear that their whole, laboriously constructed intellectual edifice might collapse.
Arthur Koestler
#17. Every error has its consequences and venges itself unto the seventh generation.
Arthur Koestler
#18. The disastrous history of our species indicates the futility of all attempts at a diagnosis which do not take into account the possibility that homo sapiens is a victim of one of evolution's countless mistakes.
Arthur Koestler
#19. Revolutionary theory had frozen to a dogmatic cult, with a simplified, easily graspable catechism, and with No. 1 as the high priest celebrating the Mass.
Arthur Koestler
#20. One question that people always ask at home is never asked here: "What happened to Communism in Russia?" Everybody yawns when a visitor brings it up, because the answer is so obvious to every Russian. The answer is that there never was Communism in Russia; there were only communists.
Arthur Koestler
#21. In creating the human brain, evolution has wildly overshot the mark.
Arthur Koestler
#22. In the course of the last century science has become so dizzy with its successes, that it has forgotten to ask the pertinent questions- or refused to ask them under the pretext that they are meaningless, and in any case not the scientists concern.
Arthur Koestler
#23. Most of us were not afraid of death, only of the act of dying; and there were times when we overcame even this fear. At such moments we were free-men without shadows, dismissed from the ranks of the mortal; it was the most complete experience of freedom that can be granted a man.
Arthur Koestler
#24. The temptation, which consisted of a single word written on the cemetary of the defeated: Sleep.
Arthur Koestler
#25. I have already thought it over,' said Rubashov. 'I reject your proposition. Logically, you may be right. But I have had enough of this kind of logic. I am tired and I don't want to play this game anymore. Be kind enough to have me taken back to my cell.
Arthur Koestler
#26. The discoveries of yesterday are the truisms of tomorrow, because we can add to our knowledge but cannot subtract from it.
Arthur Koestler
#27. The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.
Arthur Koestler
#28. The temptations of God were always more dangerous for mankind than those of Satan.
Arthur Koestler
#30. God seems to have left the receiver off the hook and time is running out.
Arthur Koestler
#31. But who will be proved right? It will only be known later. Meanwhile he is bound to act on credit and sell his soul to the devil, in the hope of history's absolution.
Arthur Koestler
#32. The addiction to the Soviet myth is as tenacious and difficult to cure as any other addiction.
Arthur Koestler
#33. No writer or teacher or artist can escape the responsibility of influencing others whether he intends to or not, whether he is conscious of it or not.
Arthur Koestler
#34. The thing represented had to pass through two distorting lenses: the artist's mind, and his medium of expression, before it emerged as a man-made dream - the two, of course, being intimately connected and interacting with each other.
Arthur Koestler
#35. The creative act does not create something out of nothing; it uncovers, selects, reshuffles, combines, synthesizes already existing facts, ideas, faculties, and skills.
Arthur Koestler
#37. From the psychological point of view, the self-asserting emotions, derived from emergency reactions, involve a narrowing of consciousness; the participatory emotions an expansion of consciousness by identificatory processes of various kinds.
Arthur Koestler
#38. One of the tests of a theory is that, once grasped, it appears self-evident.
Arthur Koestler
#39. Creative activity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.
Arthur Koestler
#41. Chemically induced hallucinations, delusions and raptures may be frightening or wonderfully gratifying; in either case they are in the nature of confidence tricks played on one's own nervous system.
Arthur Koestler
#42. Habit is the denial of creativity and the negation of freedom; a self-imposed straitjacket of which the wearer is unaware.
Arthur Koestler
#43. History had a slow pulse; man counted in years, history in generations
Arthur Koestler
#44. Death tripped down the corridor, changing step, struck out here and there, danced pirouettes; often I felt his breath on my face when he was miles away; often I fell asleep and dreamed while he stood leaning over my bed.
Arthur Koestler
#45. If conquerors be regarded as the engine-drivers of History, then the conquerors of thought are perhaps the pointsmen who, less conspicuous to the traveler's eye, determine the direction of the journey.
Arthur Koestler
#46. There is an abundance of ancient place names in the Ukraine and Poland, which derive from 'Khazar' or 'Zhid' (Jew).
Arthur Koestler
#47. The fact is: I no longer believe in my own infallibility. That is why I am lost.
Arthur Koestler
#48. What is an editor but a cross between a fall guy and a father figure? arthur koestler
Arthur Koestler
#49. The definition of the individual was: a multitude of one million divided by one million.
Arthur Koestler
#50. One may not regard the world as a sort of metaphysical brothel for emotions.
Arthur Koestler
#51. Two half-truths do not make a truth, and two half- cultures do not make a culture
Arthur Koestler
#52. There was a dense fog in my brain,impenetrable to any coherent thought,except the dull obsession of counting the minutes - an aching state of semi concsiousness and numb idiocy.
Arthur Koestler
#54. History knows no scruples and no hesitation. Inert and unnering flows towards her goal. History knows herway. She makes no mistakes.
Arthur Koestler
#55. Creativity in science could be described as the act of putting two and two together to make five
Arthur Koestler
#56. You opposed fascism, then you ditched communism.
'No, I didn't. Communism ditched me by turning into Stalinism'.
Arthur Koestler
#57. God is dethroned; and although the incognizant masses are tardy in realizing the event, they feel the icy draught caused by that vacancy. Man enters upon a spiritual ice age; the established churches can no longer provide more than Eskimo huts where their shivering flock huddles together.
Arthur Koestler
#58. We whip the groaning masses of the country towards a theoretical future happiness, which only we can see.
Arthur Koestler
#60. Scientists are peeping toms at the keyhole of eternity.
Arthur Koestler
#61. Men cannot be treated as units in operations of political arithmetic because they behave like the symbols for zero and the infinite , which dislocate all mathematical operations.
Arthur Koestler
#62. Newton's apple and Cezanne's apple are discoveries more closely related than they seem.
Arthur Koestler
#63. Courage is never to let your actions be influenced by your fears.
Arthur Koestler
#66. The revolutions of thought which shape the basic outlook of an age are not disseminated through text-books- they spread like epidemics, through contamination by invisible agents and innocent germ carriers, by the most varied forms of contact, or simply by breathing the common air.
Arthur Koestler
#67. The principal mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.
Arthur Koestler
#68. Man has an irrepressible tendency to read meaning into the buzzing confusion of sights and sounds impinging on his senses; and where no agreed meaning can be found, he will provide it out of his own imagination.
Arthur Koestler
#69. The individual is not a killer, but the group is, and by identifying with it the individual is transformed into a killer.
Arthur Koestler
#70. The story of the Khazar Empire, as it slowly emerges from the past, begins to look like the most cruel hoax which history has ever perpetrated.
Arthur Koestler
#71. To want to meet an author because you like his books is as ridiculous as wanting to meet the goose because you like pate de foie gras.
Arthur Koestler
#72. I believe that the evidence for telepathy is overwhelming and that it is a part of reality that is above science. Science allows us to glimpse [only] fragments of reality.
Arthur Koestler
#73. We find in the history of ideas mutations which do not seem to correspond to any obvious need, and at first sight appear as mere playful whimsies such as Apollonius' work on conic sections, or the non-Euclidean geometries, whose practical value became apparent only later.
Arthur Koestler
#74. The distance between the library and the bedroom is astronomical
Arthur Koestler
#75. Solitary confinement is rock bottom, it's absolute unfreedom.
Arthur Koestler
#76. If the creator has a purpose in equipping us with a neck, he surely would have meant for us to stick it out.
Arthur Koestler
#77. The moment of truth, the sudden emergence of a new insight, is an act of intuition.
Arthur Koestler
#78. Wars are not fought for territory, but for words. Man's deadliest weapon is language. He is as susceptible to being hypnotized by slogans as he is to infectious diseases. And where there is an epidemic, the group-mind takes over.
Arthur Koestler
#79. The self-assertive tendency is the dynamic expression of the holon's wholeness, the integrative tendency, the dynamic expression of its partness.
Arthur Koestler
#81. Some of the greatest discoveries ... consist mainly in the clearing away of psychological roadblocks which obstruct the approach to reality; which is why,post factum they appear so obvious.
Arthur Koestler
#82. In the meantime, the educated public continues to believe that Darwin has provided all the relevant answers by the magic formula of random mutations plus natural selection
quite unaware of the fact that random mutations turned out to be irrelevant and natural selection tautology.
Arthur Koestler
#84. The new frontiers to be conquered are mainly in the convolutions of the cortex.
Arthur Koestler
#85. The evils of mankind are caused, not by the primary aggressiveness of individuals, but by their self-transcending identification with groups whose common denominator is low intelligence and high emotionality.
Arthur Koestler
#86. There is only one prospect worse than being chained to an intolerable existence: The nightmare of a botched attempt to end it.
Arthur Koestler
#88. In any language it is a struggle to make a sentence say exactly what you mean.
Arthur Koestler
#89. Each wrong idea we follow is a crime committed against future generations.
Arthur Koestler
#90. I am not sure whether ethical absolutes exist. But I am sure that we have to act as if they existed or civilization perishes.
Arthur Koestler
#92. When all is said, its atmosphere [England's] still contains fewer germs of aggression and brutality per cubic foot in a crowded bus, pub or queue than in any other country in which I have lived
Arthur Koestler
#93. Without the hard little bits of marble which are called 'facts' or 'data' one cannot compose a mosaic; what matters, however, are not so much the individual bits, but the successive patterns into which you arrange them, then break them up and rearrange them.
Arthur Koestler
#94. The crimes of violence committed for selfish, personal motives are historically insignificant compared to those committed ad majorem gloriam Dei, out of a self-sacrificing devotion to the flag, a leader, a religeous faith or political conviction.
Arthur Koestler
#95. Among all forms of mentation, verbal thinking is the most articulate, the most complex, and the most vulnerable to infectious diseases. It is liable to absorb whispered suggestions, and to incorporate them as hidden persuaders into the code.
Arthur Koestler
#96. Had not history always been an inhumane, unscrupulous builder, mixing its mortar of lies, blood and mud?
Arthur Koestler
#97. The deterioration of the intelligentsia is as much a symptom of disease as the corruption of the ruling class or the sleeping sickness of the proletariat.
Arthur Koestler
#98. Nothing is worse in prison than the consciousness of one's innocenc; it prevents acclimatizatin and undermines one's morale ...
Arthur Koestler
#99. Conscious and unconscious experiences do not belong to different compartments of the mind; they form a continuous scale of gradations, of degrees of awareness.
Arthur Koestler
#100. Aberrations of the human mind are to a large extent due to the obsessional pursuit of some part-truth, treated as if it were a whole truth.
Arthur Koestler
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