Arthur Koestler Quotes

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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
No death is so sad and final as the death of an illusion.

Arthur Koestler
Its teaching is transmitted mainly in the form of parables as ambiguous as the pebbles in the rock-garden which symbolize now a mountain, now a fleeting tiger. When a disciple asks 'What is Zen?', the master's traditional answer is 'Three pounds of flax' or 'A decaying noodle' or 'A toilet stick' or a whack on the pupil's head.

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 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
It has been said that discovery consists in seeing an analogy which nobody had seen before.

Arthur Koestler
History had a slow pulse; man counted in years, history in generations

Arthur Koestler
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
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
If conquerors be regarded as the engine-drivers of History, then the conquerors of thought are perhaps the pointsmen who, less conspicuous to the traveller's eye, determine the direction of the journey.

Arthur Koestler
Adolescence is a kind of emotional seasickness. Both are funny, but only in retrospect.

Arthur Koestler
Newton's apple and Cezanne's apple are discoveries more closely related than they seem.

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
I went to Communism as one goes to a spring of fresh water, and I left Communism as one clambers out of a poisoned river strewn with the wreckage of flooded cities and the corpses of the drowned. This, in sum, is my story.

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
In the social equation, the value of a single life is nil; in the cosmic equation, it is infinite... Not only communism, but any political movement which implicitly relies on purely utilitarian ethics, must become a victim to the same fatal error. It is a fallacy as naïve as a mathematical teaser, and yet its consequences lead straight to Goya's Disasters, to the reign of the guillotine, the torture chambers of the Inquisition, or the cellars of the Lubianka.

Arthur Koestler
If time is treated in modern physics as a dimension on a par with the dimensions of space, why should we a priori exclude the possibility that we are pulled as well as pushed along its axis? The future has, after all, as much or as little reality as the past, and there is nothing logically inconceivable in introducing, as a working hypothesis, an element of finality, supplementary to the element of causality, into our equations. It betrays a great lack of imagination to believe that the concept of "purpose" must necessarily be associated with some anthropomorphic deity.

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

Arthur Koestler
Look at this. Did you ever see a magazine called the New Musical Express? It turns out there is a pop group called The Police - I don't know why they are called that, presumably to distinguish them from the punks - and they've made an album of my essay The Ghost in the Machine. I didn't know anything about it until my clipping agency sent me a review of the record.

Arthur Koestler
Courage is never to let your actions be influenced by your fears.

Arthur Koestler
The essence of discovery is that unlikely marriage of cabbages and kings — of previously unrelated frames of reference or universes of discourse — whose union will solve the previously insoluble problem.

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
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
The moment of truth, the sudden emergence of a new insight, is an act of intuition. Such intuitions give the appearance of miraculous flushes, or short-circuits of reasoning. In fact they may be likened to an immersed chain, of which only the beginning and the end are visible above the surface of consciousness. The diver vanishes at one end of the chain and comes up at the other end, guided by invisible links.

Arthur Koestler
Without the hard little bits of marble which are called 'facts' or 'data' one cannot compose a mosaic; what matters, however, are not so much the individual bits, but the successive patterns into which you arrange them, then break them up and rearrange them.

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

Arthur Koestler
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
God seems to have left the receiver off the hook, and time is running out.

Arthur Koestler