Arthur Koestler Quotes - Page 6

Quotes about:

• History is a priori amoral; it has no conscience.

  Arthur Koestler

  Conscience

  Arthur Koestler (2009). “Darkness at Noon: A Novel”, p.122, Simon and Schuster

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• Death tripped down the corridor, changing step, struck out here and there, danced pirouettes; often I felt his breath on my face when he was miles away; often I fell asleep and dreamed while he stood leaning over my bed.

  Arthur Koestler

  Bed, Here And There, Pirouettes

  Arthur Koestler (2011). “Dialogue with Death: The Journal of a Prisoner of the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War”, p.202, University of Chicago Press

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• I profoundly admire Aldous Huxley, both for his philosophy and uncompromising sincerity. But I disagree with his advocacy of 'the chemical opening of doors into the Other World', and with his belief that drugs can procure 'what Catholic theologians call a gratuitous grace'. Chemically induced hallucinations, delusions and raptures may be frightening or wonderfully gratifying; in either case they are in the nature of confidence tricks played on one's own nervous system.

  Arthur Koestler

  Philosophy, Doors, Other Worlds

  Arthur Koestler (1981). “Kaleidoscope: essays from Drinkers of infinity, and The heel of Achilles and later pieces and stories”, Vintage

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• The fact is: I no longer believe in my own infallibility. That is why I am lost.

  Arthur Koestler

  Believe, Facts, Lost

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• Wherever we find orderly, stable systems in Nature, we find that they are hierarchically structured, for the simple reason that without such structuring of complex systems into sub-assemblies, there could be no order and stability- except the order of a dead universe filled with a uniformly distributed gas.

  Arthur Koestler

  Simple, Order, Society

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• History knows no scruples and no hesitation. Inert and unnering flows towards her goal. History knows herway. She makes no mistakes.

  Arthur Koestler

  Mistake, Goal, Flow

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• [My father] loved me tenderly and shyly from a distance, and later on took a naive pride in seeing my name in print.

  Arthur Koestler

  Father, Distance, Pride

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

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• The life we led was a proof of man's capacity for adaptation.I think that even the condemned souls in purgatory after time develop a sort of homely routine.That is ,by the way, why most prison memoirs are unreadable.The difficulty of conveying to the reader an idea of a nightmare world from which he has emerged makes the author depict the prisoner's state of mind as an uninterruped continuity of despair.He fears to appear frivolous or to spoil his effect by admitting that even in the depths of misery cheerfulness keeps breaking in.

  Arthur Koestler

  Men, Thinking, Ideas

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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

  Sight, Ideas, Firsts

  "The First Nonlinear System of Differential and Integral Calculus". Book by Michael Grossman, 1979.

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• 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

  Dream, Artist, Men

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

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• In the index to the six hundred odd pages of Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History, abridged version, the names of Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes and Newton do not occur yet their cosmic quest destroyed the medieval vision of an immutable social order in a walled-in universe and transformed the European landscape, society, culture, habits and general outlook, as thoroughly as if a new species had arisen on this planet.

  Arthur Koestler

  Order, Names, Historical

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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

  Mean, Views, Different

  Arthur Koestler (2015). “Darkness at Noon”, p.247, Simon and Schuster

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• A publisher who writes is like a cow in a milk bar.

  Arthur Koestler

  Writing, Bars, Cows

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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 traveler's eye, determine the direction of the journey.

  Arthur Koestler

  Eye, Journey, History

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

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• Chemically induced hallucinations, delusions and raptures may be frightening or wonderfully gratifying; in either case they are in the nature of confidence tricks played on one's own nervous system.

  Arthur Koestler

  May, Hallucinations, Nervous

  Arthur Koestler (1981). “Kaleidoscope: essays from Drinkers of infinity, and The heel of Achilles and later pieces and stories”, Vintage

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• The 'missing link' between ape and man will probably never be found- because it was an embryo.

  Arthur Koestler

  Men, Missing, Society

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• We know that virtue does not matter to history, and that crimes remain unpunished; but that every error had its consequences and venges itself unto the seventh generation.

  Arthur Koestler

  Errors, Generations, Consequence

  "Darkness at Noon".

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• History knows no scruples and no hesitation. Inert and unerring, she flows towards her goal. At every bend in her course she leaves the mud which she carries and the corpses of the drowned.

  Arthur Koestler

  Goal, Mud, Flow

  Arthur Koestler (2015). “Darkness at Noon”, p.43, Simon and Schuster

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• As modern physics started with the Newtonian revolution, so modern philosophy starts with what one might call the Cartesian Catastrophe. The catastrophe consisted in the splitting up of the world into the realms of matter and mind, and the identification of 'mind' with conscious thinking. The result of this identification was the shallow rationalism of l' esprit Cartesien, and an impoverishment of psychology which it took three centuries to remedy even in part.

  Arthur Koestler

  Philosophy, Science, Thinking

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

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• Laughter and weeping, the Greek masks of comedy and tragedy, mark the extremes of a continuous spectrum; both provide channels for the overflow of emotion; both are

  Arthur Koestler

  Laughter, Greek, Tragedy

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• the self-assertive tendency is the dynamic expression of the holon's wholeness, the integrative tendency, the dynamic expression of its partness.

  Arthur Koestler

  Self, Expression, Society

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• 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

  Self, Views, Expansion

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• ...the temptation, which consisted of a single word written on the cemetary of the defeated: Sleep.

  Arthur Koestler

  Sleep, Temptation, Defeated

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