The more backwoodish a social group, juvenile or adult, the stricter its conception of the normal, and the readier it will ridicule… — Arthur Koestler Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
the self-assertive tendency is the dynamic expression of the holon's wholeness, the integrative tendency, the dynamic expression of its partness. — Arthur Koestler Copy Share Image
Wherever we find orderly, stable systems in Nature, we find that they are hierarchically structured, for the simple reason that without such… — Arthur Koestler Copy Share Image
The integrative tendencies of the individual operate through the mechanisms of empathy, sympathy, projection, introjection, identification, worship- all of which make him… — Arthur Koestler Copy Share Image
one of the tests of a theory is that, once grasped, it appears self-evident. — Arthur Koestler Copy Share Image
Some tribes [of monkeys] have taken to washing potatoes in the river before eating them, others have not. Sometimes migrating groups of… — Arthur Koestler Copy Share Image
The 'missing link' between ape and man will probably never be found- because it was an embryo. — Arthur Koestler Copy Share Image
in the course of the last century science has become so dizzy with its successes, that it has forgotten to ask the… — Arthur Koestler Copy Share Image
man has an irrepressible tendency to read meaning into the buzzing confusion of sights and sounds impinging on his senses; and where… — Arthur Koestler Copy Share Image
Modern man lives isolated in his artificial environment, not because the artificial is evil as such, but because of his lack of… — Arthur Koestler Copy Share Image
The individual is not a killer, but the group is, and by identifying with it the individual is transformed into a killer. — 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… — Arthur Koestler Copy Share Image
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,… — Arthur Koestler Copy Share Image
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… — Arthur Koestler Copy Share Image
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