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… — Arthur Koestler Copy Share Image
The inner defenses are unconscious. They consist of a kind of magic aura which the mind builds around cherished belief. Arguments which penetrate into… — Arthur Koestler Copy Share Image
The temptations of God were always more dangerous for mankind than those of Satan. — Arthur Koestler Copy Share Image
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… — Arthur Koestler Copy Share
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 Copy Share Image
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… — Arthur Koestler Copy Share
Coincidence may be described as the chance encounter of two unrelated causal chains which - miraculously, it seems - merge into a significant event. — Arthur Koestler Copy Share Image
The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards. — Arthur Koestler Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
Coincidence may be described as the chance encounter of two unrelated causal chains which — Arthur Koestler Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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… — Arthur Koestler Copy Share
If one looks with a cold eye at the mess man has made of history, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that he… — Arthur Koestler Copy Share Image
