Arthur Koestler Quotes

89 Sourced Quotes

The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.

Arthur Koestler
The most persistent sound which reverberates through man's history is the beating of war drums.

Arthur Koestler
The definition of the individual was: a multitude of one million divided by one million.

Arthur Koestler
Prometheus is reaching out for the stars with an empty grin on his face.

Arthur Koestler
Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.

Arthur Koestler
True creativity often starts where language ends.

Arthur Koestler
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
The ultimate truth is penultimately always a falsehood. He who will be proved right in the end appears to be wrong and harmful before it.

Arthur Koestler
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
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
Man cannot inherit the past; he has to recreate it.

Arthur Koestler
Behaviourism is indeed a kind of flat-earth view of the mind…it has substituted for the erstwhile anthropomorphic view of the rat, a ratomorphic view of man.

Arthur Koestler
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
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
If power corrupts, the reverse is also true; persecution corrupts the victims though perhaps in subtler and more tragic ways.

Arthur Koestler
The history of cosmic theories... may without exaggeration be called a history of collective obsessions and controlled schizophrenias.

Arthur Koestler
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
The sixth pre-Christian century—the miraculous century of Buddha, Confucius and Lâo-Tse, of the Ionian philosophers and Pythagoras—was a turning point for the human species. A March breeze seemed to blow across the planet from China to Samos, stirring man into awareness, like the breath of Adam's nostrils. In the Ionian school of philosophy, rational thought was emerging from the mythological dream-world.... which, within the next two thousand years, would transform the species more radically than the previous two hundred thousand had done.

Arthur Koestler
The prerequisite of originality is the art of forgetting, at the proper moment, what we know.

Arthur Koestler
There are no longer any absolute directions in space. The universe has lost its core. It no longer has a heart, but a thousand hearts.

Arthur Koestler
If one looks with a cold eye at the mess man has made of history, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that he has been afflicted by some built-in mental disorder which drives him towards self-destruction.

Arthur Koestler
My comfort is what Einstein said…'If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor'.

Arthur Koestler
We can add to our knowledge, but we cannot subtract from it.

Arthur Koestler
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
Einstein's space is no closer to reality than Van Gogh's sky. The glory of science is not in a truth more absolute than the truth of Bach or Tolstoy, but in the act of creation itself. The scientist's discoveries impose his own order on chaos, as the composer or painter imposes his; an order that always refers to limited aspects of reality, and is based on the observer's frame of reference, which differs from period to period as a Rembrant nude differs from a nude by Manet.

Arthur Koestler