The real achievement in discoveries... is seeing an analogy where no one saw one before... The essence of discovery is that unlikely… — 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 real achievement in discoveries ... is seeing an analogy where no one saw one before. .. The essence of discovery is… — Arthur Koestler Copy Share Image
It is impossible to decide whether a particular detail of the Pythagorean universe was the work of the master, or filled in… — Arthur Koestler Copy Share Image
In my youth I regarded the universe as an open book, printed in the language of equations, whereas now it appears to… — Arthur Koestler Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
In the index to the six hundred odd pages of Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History, abridged version, the names of Copernicus,… — 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… — 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
