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The limitations of our biological equipment may condemn us to the role of Peeping Toms at the keyhole of eternity.
Arthur Koestler
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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No death is so sad and final as the death of an illusion.
Arthur Koestler
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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.
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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.
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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
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It has been said that discovery consists in seeing an analogy which nobody had seen before.
Arthur Koestler
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History had a slow pulse; man counted in years, history in generations
Arthur Koestler
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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
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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
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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
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Adolescence is a kind of emotional seasickness. Both are funny, but only in retrospect.
Arthur Koestler
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Newton's apple and Cezanne's apple are discoveries more closely related than they seem.
Arthur Koestler
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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
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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
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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
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We owe something to extravagance, for thrift and adventure seldom go hand in hand.
Lady Randolph Churchill
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
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