Arthur Koestler - Years Quotes

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

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

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