Arthur Koestler Quotes - Page 2

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• When a chess player looks at the board, he does not see a static mosaic, a 'still life', but a magnetic field of forces, charged with energy - as Faraday saw the stresses surrounding magnets and currents as curves in space; or as Van Gogh saw vortices in the skies of Provence.

  Arthur Koestler

  Stress, Player, Curves

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• We cannot unthink unless we are insane.

  Arthur Koestler

  Thinking, Insanity, Insane

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• True creativity often starts where language ends.

  Arthur Koestler

  Inspirational, Business, Creativity

  Arthur Koestler (1969). “The Act of Creation”

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• I am not sure whether ethical absolutes exist. But I am sure that we have to act as if they existed or civilization perishes.

  Arthur Koestler

  Civilization, Ethics, Ethical

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• Habit is the denial of creativity and the negation of freedom; a self-imposed straitjacket of which the wearer is unaware.

  Arthur Koestler

  Creativity, Self, Empathy

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

  Arthur Koestler

  Israel, Way, Power Corrupts

  Arthur Koestler, Harold Harris (1975). “Astride the two cultures: Arthur Koestler at 70”, Not Avail

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• The jester is brother to the sage.

  Arthur Koestler

  Brother, Sage, Jester

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• The real achievement in discoveries... is seeing an analogy where no one saw one before... 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

  Real, Science, Discovery

  "The Act of Creation".

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• 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

  Giving, Intuition, Links

  Arthur Koestler (1969). “The Act of Creation”

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• I have repeatedly stressed that the selfish impulses of man constitute a much less historic danger than his integrative tendencies. To put it in the simplest way: the individual who indulges in an excess of aggressive self-assertiveness incurs the penalties of society-he outlaws himself, he contracts out of the hierarchy. The true believer, on the other hand, becomes more closely knit into it; he enters the womb of his church, or party, or whatever the social holon to which he surrenders his identity.

  Arthur Koestler

  Selfish, Party, Men

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• ...the crimes of violence committed for selfish, personal motives are historically insignificant compared to those committed ad majorem gloriam Dei, out of a self-sacrificing devotion to the flag, a leader, a religeous faith or political conviction.

  Arthur Koestler

  Selfish, Sacrifice, Leader

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• 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

  What Matters, Data, Facts

  Arthur Koestler (1964). “The Act of Creation”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

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• Modern man lives isolated in his artificial environment, not because the artificial is evil as such, but because of his lack of comprehension of the forces which make it work- of the principles which relate his gadgets to the forces of nature, to the universal order. It is not central heating which makes his existence 'unnatural,' but his refusal to take an interest in the principles behind it. By being entirely dependent on science, yet closing his mind to it, he leads the life of an urban barbarian.

  Arthur Koestler

  Men, Order, Evil

  Arthur Koestler (1969). “The Act of Creation”

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• The most persistent sound which reverberates through man's history is the beating of war drums.

  Arthur Koestler

  Veterans Day, Military, War

  Janus (1978) prologue

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• The integrative tendencies of the individual operate through the mechanisms of empathy, sympathy, projection, introjection, identification, worship- all of which make him feel that he is a part of some larger entity which transcends the boundaries of the individual self. This psychological urge to belong, to participate, to commune is as primary and real as its opposite. The all-important question is the nature of that higher entity of which the individual feels himself a part.

  Arthur Koestler

  Real, Self, Opposites

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• If one looks with a cold eye at the mess man has made of his 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. Murder within the species on an individual or collective scale is a phenomenon unknown in the whole animal kingdom, except for man, and a few varieties of ants and rats.

  Arthur Koestler

  Eye, Men, Animal

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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

  Past, Looks, Stories

  Arthur Koestler (1976). “The thirteenth tribe: the Khazar empire and its heritage”, Random House Inc

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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

  Faith, Horse, Believe

  Andre Gide, Richard Wright, Ignasio Silone, Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler, Louis Fischer (1965). “the god that failed”

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• I believe that the evidence for telepathy is overwhelming and that it is a part of reality that is above science. Science allows us to glimpse [only] fragments of reality.

  Arthur Koestler

  Believe, Reality, Glimpse

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• Nobody before the Pythagorean had thought that mathematical relations held the secret of the universe. Twenty-five 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

  Wisdom, Blessed, Power

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• 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

  Errors, Political, Single Life

  Arthur Koestler (1952). “Arrow in the blue: an autobiography”

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• If the creator has a purpose in equipping us with a neck, he surely would have meant for us to stick it out.

  Arthur Koestler

  Courage, Innovation, Purpose

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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

  Mind, Degrees, Different

  Arthur Koestler (1964). “The Act of Creation”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

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• Woe unto the defeated, whom history treads into the dust.

  Arthur Koestler

  Dust, Woe Unto, History

  ARTHUR KOESTLER (1941). “DARKNESS AT NOON”

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• Innovation is a twofold threat to academic mediocrities: it endangers their oracular authority, and it evokes the deeper fear that their whole, laboriously constructed intellectual edifice might collapse.

  Arthur Koestler

  Fear, Innovation, Intellectual

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