Identity Quotes by Arthur Koestler

9 Identity quotes by Arthur Koestler

All Identity quotes Arthur Koestler’s page

Arthur Koestler probes the paradoxes of self‑knowledge with intellectual rigor. In these nine short quotes, he challenges conventional ideas about personal identity.

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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

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

Arthur Koestler

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The evils of mankind are caused, not by the primary aggressiveness of individuals, but by their self-transcending identification with groups whose common…

Arthur Koestler

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“... on the historical scale, the damages wrought by individual violence for selfish motives are insignificant compared to the holocausts resulting from…

Arthur Koestler

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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

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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…

Arthur Koestler

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When a person identifies himself with a group his critical faculties are diminished and his passions enhanced by a kind of emotive…

Arthur Koestler

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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…

Arthur Koestler

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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…

Arthur Koestler

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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…

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

Arthur Koestler

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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…

Arthur Koestler

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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…

Arthur Koestler

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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,…

Arthur Koestler

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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.

Arthur Koestler

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

Arthur Koestler

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“Revolutionary theory had frozen to a dogmatic cult, with a simplified, easily graspable catechism, and with No. 1 as the high priest celebrating the Mass.”

Arthur Koestler

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Coincidence may be described as the chance encounter of two unrelated causal chains which

Arthur Koestler

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

Arthur Koestler

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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…

Arthur Koestler