Arthur Koestler

Learn from the mistakes of others. You can't live long enough to make them all yourself. Boredom sets into boring minds. The…

— Arthur Koestler

Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history; at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible…

— Arthur Koestler

“There was a dense fog in my brain,impenetrable to any coherent thought,except the dull obsession of counting the minutes - an aching…

— Arthur Koestler

The more backwoodish a social group, juvenile or adult, the stricter its conception of the normal, and the readier it will ridicule…

— Arthur Koestler

No writer or teacher or artist can escape the responsibility of influencing others whether he intends to or not, whether he is…

— Arthur Koestler

in the course of the last century science has become so dizzy with its successes, that it has forgotten to ask the…

— Arthur Koestler

Men cannot be treated as units in operations of political arithmetic because they behave like the symbols for zero and the infinite…

— Arthur Koestler

Creative synthesis has a basic, bisociative pattern : the sudden interlocking of two previously unrelated skills or matrices of thought.

— Arthur Koestler

“For in a struggle one must have both legs firmly planted on the earth. The Party had taught one how to do…

— Arthur Koestler

One question that people always ask at home is never asked here: "What happened to Communism in Russia?" Everybody yawns when a…

— Arthur Koestler

...the cosmology of a given age is not the result of unilinear, "scientific" development, but rather the most striking, imaginative symbol of…

— Arthur Koestler

The real achievement in discoveries... is seeing an analogy where no one saw one before... The essence of discovery is that unlikely…

— Arthur Koestler

When reality becomes unbearable, the mind must withdraw from it and create a world of artificial perfection. Plato's world of pure Ideas…

— Arthur Koestler

Most of us were not afraid of death, only of the act of dying; and there were times when we overcame even…

— Arthur Koestler

Man's destiny was no longer determined from 'above' by a super-human wisdom and will, but from 'below' by the sub-human agencies of…

— Arthur Koestler

Nobody before the Pythagorean had thought that mathematical relations held the secret of the universe. Twenty-five centuries later, Europe is still blessed…

— Arthur Koestler

If conquerors be regarded as the engine-drivers of History, then the conquerors of thought are perhaps the pointsmen who, less conspicuous to…

— Arthur Koestler

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

— Arthur Koestler

Innovation is a twofold threat to academic mediocrities: it endangers their oracular authority, and it evokes the deeper fear that their whole,…

— Arthur Koestler

The ultimate truth is penultimately always a falsehood. He who will be proved right in the end appears to be wrong and…

— Arthur Koestler

Coincidence may be described as the chance encounter of two unrelated causal chains which - miraculously, it seems - merge into a…

— 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…

— Arthur Koestler

The progress of science, like an ancient desert trail, is strewn with the bleached skeletons of discarded theories, doctrines, and axioms which…

— Arthur Koestler

The creative act does not create something out of nothing; it uncovers, selects, reshuffles, combines, synthesizes already existing facts, ideas, faculties, and…

— Arthur Koestler

“Persuasion may play a part in a man's conversion; but only the part of bringing to its full and conscious climax a…

— Arthur Koestler

“Nothing is worse in prison than the consciousness of one's innocenc; it prevents acclimatizatin and undermines one's morale...”

— Arthur Koestler

When all is said, its atmosphere [England's] still contains fewer germs of aggression and brutality per cubic foot in a crowded bus,…

— 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…

— Arthur Koestler

The progress of science is strewn, like an ancient desert trail, with the bleached skeleton of discarded theories which once seemed to…

— Arthur Koestler

Hitherto man had to live with the idea of death as an individual; from now onward mankind will have to live with…

— Arthur Koestler

No man is an island- he is a holon. A Janus-faced entity who, looking inward, sees himself as a self-contained unique whole,…

— Arthur Koestler

God is dethroned; and although the incognizant masses are tardy in realizing the event, they feel the icy draught caused by that…

— Arthur Koestler

The inner defenses are unconscious. They consist of a kind of magic aura which the mind builds around cherished belief. Arguments which…

— Arthur Koestler

The continuous disasters of man's history are mainly due to his excessive capacity and urge to become identified with a tribe, nation,…

— Arthur Koestler

Indeed, the ideal for a well-functioning democratic state is like the ideal for a gentleman's well-cut suit it is not noticed. For…

— Arthur Koestler

If there is a lesson in our story it is that the manipulation, according to strictly self-consistent rules, of a set of…

— Arthur Koestler

“Our White - Whites were a mixed crowd,including a well - known doctor,owner of a chateau near Versailles,an opera singer with an…

— Arthur Koestler

The integrative tendencies of the individual operate through the mechanisms of empathy, sympathy, projection, introjection, identification, worship- all of which make him…

— Arthur Koestler

“It was quiet in the cell. Rubashov heard only the creaking of his steps on the tiles. Six and a half steps…

— Arthur Koestler