Arthur Koestler Quotes

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

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

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

Arthur Koestler
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
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
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
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
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
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
The limitations of our biological equipment may condemn us to the role of Peeping Toms at the keyhole of eternity.

Arthur Koestler
Nobody before the Pythagoreans had thought that mathematical relations held the secret of the universe. Twentyfive centuries later, Europe is still blessed and cursed with their heritage. To non-European civilizations, the idea that numbers are the key to both wisdom and power, seems never to have occurred.

Arthur Koestler
Indeed, the ideal for a well-functioning democratic state is like the ideal for a gentleman's well-cut suit — it is not noticed. For the common people of Britain, Gestapo and concentration camps have approximately the same degree of reality as the monster of Loch Ness. Atrocity propaganda is helpless against this healthy lack of imagination.

Arthur Koestler
The progress of science is strewn, like an ancient desert trail, with the bleached skeletons of discarded theories which once seemed to possess eternal life.

Arthur Koestler
Zen is to religion what a Japanese rock garden is to a garden. Zen knows no god, no afterlife, no good and no evil, as the rock-garden knows no flowers, herbs or shrubs. It has no doctrine or holy writ.

Arthur Koestler
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
If there is a lesson in our story it is that the manipulation, according to strictly self-consistent rules, of a set of symbols representing one single aspect of the phenomena may produce correct, verifiable predictions, and yet completely ignore all other aspects whose ensemble constitutes reality...

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
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
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