Arthur Koestler Quotes

89 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Arthur Koestler
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
True creativity often starts where language ends.

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

Arthur Koestler
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
The temptations of God were always more dangerous for mankind than those of Satan.

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
Myths grow like crystals, according to their own, recurrent pattern; but there must be a suitable core to start their growth.

Arthur Koestler
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
One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up.

Arthur Koestler
Artists treat facts as stimuli for the imagination, while scientists use their imagination to coordinate facts.

Arthur Koestler
There may be thousands of relevant bits of information lying dormant in hundreds of technical journals on dusty library shelves which, if remembered, would act as Open Sesames.

Arthur Koestler
But, glory be, man is not a flat-earth dweller all the time — only most of the time. Like the universe in which he lives, he is in a state of continuous creation.

Arthur Koestler
Went down to explore a Black Hole. A stark singularity, Devoid of all charity, Devoured the mole as a whole.

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
The genetic code [is] written in the four-letter alphabet, "A", "G", "C", "T." Here, then, floating in the nuclear sap, is the code which governs the skill of creating a six-foot drum major with a slight squint and dimpled cheeks out of an egg with a diameter of a few microns.

Arthur Koestler
There is an abundance of ancient place names in the Ukraine and Poland, which derive from 'Khazar' or 'Zhid' (Jew).

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

Arthur Koestler
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
Every error has its consequences and venges itself unto the seventh generation.

Arthur Koestler
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.

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

Arthur Koestler
Man can leave the earth and land on the moon, but cannot cross from East to West Berlin. Prometheus reaches for the stars with an insane grin on his face and a totem-symbol in his hand.

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
I profoundly admire Aldous Huxley, both for his philosophy and uncompromising sincerity. But I disagree with his advocacy of 'the chemical opening of doors into the Other World', and with his belief that drugs can procure 'what Catholic theologians call a gratuitous grace'. 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
One may not regard the world as a sort of metaphysical brothel for emotions.

Arthur Koestler
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