Arthur Koestler - The Act of Creation (1964)

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True creativity often starts where language ends.

Arthur Koestler
The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.

Arthur Koestler
The genetic code [is] written in the four-letter alphabet, "A", "G", "C", "T." Here, then, floating in the nuclear sap, is the code which governs the skill of creating a six-foot drum major with a slight squint and dimpled cheeks out of an egg with a diameter of a few microns.

Arthur Koestler
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
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
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
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
Among all forms of mentation, verbal thinking is the most articulate, the most complex, and the most vulnerable to infectious diseases. It is liable to absorb whispered suggestions, and to incorporate them as hidden persuaders into the code.

Arthur Koestler
The thing represented had to pass through two distorting lenses: the artist's mind, and his medium of expression, before it emerged as a man-made dream - the two, of course, being intimately connected and interacting with each other.

Arthur Koestler
Man cannot inherit the past; he has to recreate it.

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

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
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
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
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