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Man's destiny was no longer determined from 'above' by a super-human wisdom and will, but from 'below' by the sub-human agencies of glands, genes, atoms, or waves of probability....they could determine his fate, but could provide him with no moral guidance, no values and meaning. A puppet of the Gods is a tragic figure, a puppet suspended on his chromosomes is merely grotesque.
Arthur Koestler
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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
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It is impossible to decide whether a particular detail of the Pythagorean universe was the work of the master, or filled in by a pupil a remark which equally applies to Leonardo or Michelangelo. But there can be no doubt that the basic features were conceived by a single mind; that Pythagoras of Samos was both the founder of a new religious philosophy, and the founder of Science, as the word is understood today.
Arthur Koestler
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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
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No scientist is admired for failing in the attempt to solve problems that lie beyond his competence. The most he can hope for is the kindly contempt earned by the Utopian politician. If politics is the art of the possible, research is surely the art of the soluble. Both are immensely practical-minded affairs.
Arthur Koestler
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Snobbery is not merely a silly human weakness but something basic in the mentality of modern man-a symptom which reflects the general sickness, the dislocation of social and cultural values in contemporary civilization.
Arthur Koestler
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Went down to explore a Black Hole. A stark singularity, Devoid of all charity, Devoured the mole as a whole.
Arthur Koestler
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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
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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
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Artists treat facts as stimuli for the imagination, while scientists use their imagination to coordinate facts.
Arthur Koestler
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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
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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
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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
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The creativity and pathology of the human mind are, after all, two sides of the same medal coined in the evolutionary mint. The first is responsible for the splendour of our cathedrals, the second for the gargoyles that decorate them to remind us that the world is full of monsters, devils, and succubi.
Arthur Koestler
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The more backwoodish a social group, juvenile or adult, the stricter its conception of the normal, and the readier it will ridicule any departure from it.
Arthur Koestler
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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
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The Revolutionary's Utopia, which in appearance represents a complete break with the past, is always modeled on some image of the Lost Paradise, of a legendary Golden Age... All utopias are fed from the source of mythology; the social engineers' blueprints are merely revised editions of the ancient text.
Arthur Koestler
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Creativity in science could be described as the art of putting two and two together to make five. In other words, it consists in combining previously unrelated mental structures in such a way that you get more out of the emergent whole than you have put in.
Arthur Koestler
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If power corrupts, the reverse is also true; persecution corrupts the victims though perhaps in subtler and more tragic ways.
Arthur Koestler
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Neo-Darwinism does indeed carry the nineteenth-century brand of materialism to its extreme limits — to the proverbial monkey at the typewriter, hitting by pure chance on the proper keys to produce a Shakespeare sonnet.
Arthur Koestler
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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
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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
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The principle mark of genius is not perfection, but originality, the opening of new frontiers; once this is done, the conquered territory becomes common property.
Arthur Koestler
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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
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Never force yourself to read a book — it is a wasted effort. That book is right for you which needs just the amount of concentration on your part to make you turn the radio off.
Arthur Koestler
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Quote of the day
Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.
Ogden Nash
Arthur Koestler
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Born:
September 5, 1905
Died:
March 1, 1983
(aged 77)
Bio:
Arthur Koestler was a Hungarian-British author and journalist. Koestler was born in Budapest and, apart from his early school years, was educated in Austria.
Known for:
Darkness at Noon (1940)
The Act of Creation (1964)
The Ghost in the Machine (1967)
Scum of the Earth (1941)
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communism
truth
reality
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