Arthur Koestler Quotes - Page 3

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• The inner defenses are unconscious. They consist of a kind of magic aura which the mind builds around cherished belief. Arguments which penetrate into the magic aura are not dealt with rationally but by a specific type of pseudo-reasoning. Absurdities and contradictions are made acceptable by specious rationalizations.

  Arthur Koestler

  Mind, Magic, Atheism

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• Aggressiveness is not the main trouble with the human species, but rather an excess capacity for fanatical devotion.

  Arthur Koestler

  Excess, Trouble, Devotion

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• The revolutions of thought which shape the basic outlook of an age are not disseminated through text-books- they spread like epidemics, through contamination by invisible agents and innocent germ carriers, by the most varied forms of contact, or simply by breathing the common air.

  Arthur Koestler

  Book, Epidemics, Air

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• Coincidence may be described as the chance encounter of two unrelated causal chains which-miraculously, it seems-merge into a significant event. It provides the neatest paradigm of the bisociation of previously separate contexts, engineered by fate. Coincidences are puns of destiny. In the pun, two strings of thought are tangled into one acoustic knot; in the coincidental happening, two strings of events are knitted together by invisible hands.

  Arthur Koestler

  Fate, Destiny, Hands

  "Bricks to Babel". Book by Arthur Koestler, 1980.

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• The Revolutionary's Utopia, which in appearance represents a complete break with the past, is always modeled on some image of the Lost Paradise, of a legendary Golden Age... All utopias are fed from the source of mythology; the social engineers' blueprints are merely revised editions of the ancient text.

  Arthur Koestler

  Past, Atheism, Age

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

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• When reality becomes unbearable, the mind must withdraw from it and create a world of artificial perfection. Plato's world of pure Ideas and Forms, which alone is to be considered as real, whereas the world of nature which we perceive is merely its cheap Woolworth copy, is a flight into delusion.

  Arthur Koestler

  Plato, Real, Ideas

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• All "if" statements about the past are as dubious as prophecies of the future are. It seems fairly plausible that if Alexander or Ghengis Khan had never been born, some other individual would have filled his place and executed the design of the Hellenic or Mongolic expansion; but the Alexanders of philosophy and religion, of science and art, seem less expendable; their impact seems less determined by economic challenges and social pressures; and they seem to have a much wider range of possibilities to influence the direction, shape and texture of civilizations.

  Arthur Koestler

  Art, Philosophy, Past

  "The Sleepwalkeers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe". Book by Arthur Koestler, 1959.

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• 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

  Zero, Men, Political

  Arthur Koestler (2011). “Dialogue with Death: The Journal of a Prisoner of the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War”, p.12, University of Chicago Press

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• One may not regard the world as a sort of metaphysical brothel for emotions.

  Arthur Koestler

  World, May, Emotion

  'Darkness at Noon' (1940) 'The Second Hearing' ch. 7

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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

  Truth, Ends, Ultimate

  Arthur Koestler (2015). “Darkness at Noon”, p.97, Simon and Schuster

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• Two half-truths do not make a truth, and two half- cultures do not make a culture

  Arthur Koestler

  Two, Culture, Half

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• God is dethroned; and although the incognizant masses are tardy in realizing the event, they feel the icy draught caused by that vacancy. Man enters upon a spiritual ice age; the established churches can no longer provide more than Eskimo huts where their shivering flock huddles together.

  Arthur Koestler

  Spiritual, Men, Ice

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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: its teaching is transmitted mainly in the form of parables as ambiguous as the pebbles in the rock-garden which symbolise 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

  Flower, Teaching, Garden

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• 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

  Thinking, Suggestions, Disease

  1964 The Act of Creation.

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• The temptations of God were always more dangerous for mankind than those of Satan.

  Arthur Koestler

  Temptation, Satan, Dangerous

  Arthur Koestler (1955). “Darkness at noon”

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• The greatest temptation for the like of us is: to renounce violence, to repent, to make peace with oneself. Most revolutionaries fell before this temptation, from Spartacus to Danton and Dostoevsky; they are the classical form of betrayal of the cause. The temptations of God were always more dangerous for mankind than those of Satan. As long as chaos dominates the world, God is an anachronism; and every compromise with one’s own conscience is perfidy. When the accursed inner voice speaks to you, hold your hands over your ears….

  Arthur Koestler

  Betrayal, Hands, Voice

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

  Arthur Koestler

  Art, Creativity, Originality

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

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• The creativity and pathology of the human mind are, after all, two sides of the same medal coined in the evolutionary mint. The first is responsible for the splendour of our cathedrals, the second for the gargoyles that decorate them to remind us that the world is full of monsters, devils, and succubi.

  Arthur Koestler

  Creativity, Two Sides, Mind

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

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• God seems to have left the receiver off the hook and time is running out.

  Arthur Koestler

  God, Running, Religious

  'The Ghost in the Machine' (1967) ch. 18

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• The integrative tendencies of the individual are incomparably more dangerous than his self-assertive tendencies.

  Arthur Koestler

  Self, Individual, Tendencies

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• To sell oneself for thirty pieces of silver is an honest transaction; but to sell oneself to one s own conscience is to abandon mankind.

  Arthur Koestler

  Pieces, Honest, Silver

  Arthur Koestler (1955). “Darkness at noon”

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• 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

  Believe, Reality, Past

  "The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe". Book by Arthur Koestler, 1959.

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

  Arthur Koestler

  Men, Years, Pulse

  Arthur Koestler (2015). “Darkness at Noon”, p.265, Simon and Schuster

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• When all is said, its atmosphere [England's] still contains fewer germs of aggression and brutality per cubic foot in a crowded bus, pub or queue than in any other country in which I have lived

  Arthur Koestler

  Country, Feet, Atmosphere

  Arthur Koestler (1973). “The lion and the ostrich: the eighth annual lecture under the "Thank-offering to Britain Fund."”, Not Avail

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• Scientists are peeping toms at the keyhole of eternity.

  Arthur Koestler

  Funny, Science, Eternity

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