Top 100 Koestler's Quotes
#1. I had never given much credence to the phenomenon of "writer's block". I was more inclined to think of it as "writer's impatience", and to follow Arthur Koestler's dictum: "Soak; and wait.
Alan Garner
#2. We whip the groaning masses of the country towards a theoretical future happiness, which only we can see.
Arthur Koestler
#4. 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
#5. You opposed fascism, then you ditched communism.
'No, I didn't. Communism ditched me by turning into Stalinism'.
Arthur Koestler
#6. Creativity in science could be described as the act of putting two and two together to make five
Arthur Koestler
#7. History knows no scruples and no hesitation. Inert and unnering flows towards her goal. History knows herway. She makes no mistakes.
Arthur Koestler
#9. When a chess player looks at the board, he does not see a static mosaic, a 'still life', but a magnetic field of forces, charged with energy - as Faraday saw the stresses surrounding magnets and currents as curves in space; or as Van Gogh saw vortices in the skies of Provence.
Arthur Koestler
#10. Adolescence is a kind of emotional seasickness. Both are funny, but only in retrospect.
Arthur Koestler
#11. 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
#12. Two half-truths do not make a truth, and two half- cultures do not make a culture
Arthur Koestler
#13. One may not regard the world as a sort of metaphysical brothel for emotions.
Arthur Koestler
#14. The definition of the individual was: a multitude of one million divided by one million.
Arthur Koestler
#15. What is an editor but a cross between a fall guy and a father figure? arthur koestler
Arthur Koestler
#16. Woe unto the defeated, whom history treads into the dust.
Arthur Koestler
#17. The fact is: I no longer believe in my own infallibility. That is why I am lost.
Arthur Koestler
#18. There is an abundance of ancient place names in the Ukraine and Poland, which derive from 'Khazar' or 'Zhid' (Jew).
Arthur Koestler
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. History had a slow pulse; man counted in years, history in generations
Arthur Koestler
#22. Habit is the denial of creativity and the negation of freedom; a self-imposed straitjacket of which the wearer is unaware.
Arthur Koestler
#23. 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
#25. Creative activity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.
Arthur Koestler
#26. The cosmology of a given age is not the result of unilinear, "scientific" development, but rather the most striking, imaginative symbol of its mentality- the projection of its conflicts, prejudice and specific ways of double-think onto the graceful sky.
Arthur Koestler
#27. The individual is not a killer, but the group is, and by identifying with it the individual is transformed into a killer.
Arthur Koestler
#28. Nothing is worse in prison than the consciousness of one's innocenc; it prevents acclimatizatin and undermines one's morale ...
Arthur Koestler
#29. Persuasion may play a part in a man's conversion; but only the part of bringing to its full and conscious climax a process which has been maturing in regions where no persuasion can penetrate. A faith is not acquired; it grows like a tree.
Arthur Koestler
#30. 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
#31. When reality becomes unbearable, the mind must withdraw from it and create a world of artificial perfection. Plato's world of pure Ideas and Forms, which alone is to be considered as real, whereas the world of nature which we perceive is merely its cheap Woolworth copy, is a flight into delusion.
Arthur Koestler
#32. When a person identifies himself with a group his critical faculties are diminished and his passions enhanced by a kind of emotive resonance. The individual is not a killer, the group is, and by identifying with it, the individual becomes one. This is the infernal dialect reflected in man's history.
Arthur Koestler
#33. To sell oneself for thirty pieces of silver is an honest transaction; but to sell oneself to one s own conscience is to abandon mankind.
Arthur Koestler
#34. The self-assertive tendency is the dynamic expression of the holon's wholeness, the integrative tendency, the dynamic expression of its partness.
Arthur Koestler
#35. 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
#36. Solitary confinement is rock bottom, it's absolute unfreedom.
Arthur Koestler
#37. Show us not the aim without the way.
For ends and means on earth are so entangled
That changing one, you change the other too;
Each different path brings other ends in view
Arthur Koestler
#38. The pressure of the environment cramps art as it cramps behaviour. One may challenge this environment, but one has to pay for it, and the price is neurotic guilt. There never was an intelligentsia without a guilt complex; it is the income tax one has to pay for wanting to make others richer.
Arthur Koestler
#39. 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
#40. One of the tests of a theory is that, once grasped, it appears self-evident.
Arthur Koestler
#41. 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
#42. Every creative act involves a new innocence or perception, liberated from the cataract of accepted belief.
Arthur Koestler
#43. The principal mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.
Arthur Koestler
#44. Space-ships and time machines are no escape from the human condition. Let Othello subject Desdemona to a lie-detector test; his jealousy will still blind him to the evidence. Let Oedipus triumph over gravity; he won't triumph over his fate.
Arthur Koestler
#45. 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
#48. Courage is never to let your actions be influenced by your fears.
Arthur Koestler
#49. Newton's apple and Cezanne's apple are discoveries more closely related than they seem.
Arthur Koestler
#50. 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
#51. Scientists are peeping toms at the keyhole of eternity.
Arthur Koestler
#52. 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
#53. For the anthropomorphic view of the rat, American psychology substituted a rattomorphic view of man. - Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation
Alfie Kohn
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. Every error has its consequences and venges itself unto the seventh generation.
Arthur Koestler
#58. 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
#59. Coincidence may be described as the chance encounter of two unrelated causal chains which
Arthur Koestler
#60. 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
#61. If power corrupts, the reverse is also true; persecution corrupts the victims though perhaps in subtler and more tragic ways.
Arthur Koestler
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. The prerequisite of originality is the art of forgetting, at the proper moment, what we know.
Arthur Koestler
#66. 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
#67. and there was only one revolutionary virtue which he had not learned, the virtue of self-deception
Arthur Koestler
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. In the pun, two strings of thought are tangled into one acoustic knot.
Arthur Koestler
#71. 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
#72. The 'missing link' between ape and man will probably never be found- because it was an embryo.
Arthur Koestler
#73. One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up.
Arthur Koestler
#74. Perhaps he did not know himself - like all these intellectual cynics ...
Arthur Koestler
#75. [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
#76. The most persistent sound which reverberates through man's history is the beating of war drums.
Arthur Koestler
#78. 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
#80. What an enormous longing for a new human order there was in the era between the world wars, and what a miserable failure to live up to it.'(Arthur Koestler)
Tony Judt
#81. The evolution of the brain not only overshot the needs of prehistoric man, it is the only example of evolution providing a species with an organ which it does not know how to use.
Arthur Koestler
#82. 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
#83. You can't help people being right for the wrong reasons ... This fear of finding oneself in bad company is not an expression of political purity; it is an expression of a lack of self-confidence.
Arthur Koestler
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. The addiction to the Soviet myth is as tenacious and difficult to cure as any other addiction.
Arthur Koestler
#87. 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
#88. God seems to have left the receiver off the hook and time is running out.
Arthur Koestler
#89. Faith is a wondrous thing; it is not only capable of moving mountains, but also of making you believe that a herring is a race horse.
Arthur Koestler
#90. The temptations of God were always more dangerous for mankind than those of Satan.
Arthur Koestler
#91. The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.
Arthur Koestler
#92. The discoveries of yesterday are the truisms of tomorrow, because we can add to our knowledge but cannot subtract from it.
Arthur Koestler
#93. 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
#94. Prometheus is reaching out for the stars with an empty grin on his face.
Arthur Koestler
#95. The temptation, which consisted of a single word written on the cemetary of the defeated: Sleep.
Arthur Koestler
#96. 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
#98. 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
#99. Much depends on asking the right question at the right time.
Arthur Koestler
#100. In creating the human brain, evolution has wildly overshot the mark.
Arthur Koestler
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