Arthur Koestler Quotes

111 quotes in 1848 categories

• ...the crimes of violence committed for selfish, personal motives are historically insignificant compared to those committed ad majorem gloriam Dei, out of a self-sacrificing devotion…
• There is only one prospect worse than being chained to an intolerable existence: The nightmare of a botched attempt to end it.
• Space-ships and time machines are no escape from the human condition. Let Othello subject Desdemona to a lie-detector test; his jealousy will still blind him…
• If the creator has a purpose in equipping us with a neck, he surely would have meant for us to stick it out.
• The prerequisite of originality is the art of forgetting, at the proper moment, what we know.
• In creating the human brain, evolution has wildly overshot the mark.
• 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…
• The real achievement in discoveries ... is seeing an analogy where no one saw one before. .. The essence of discovery is that unlikely marriage…
• The evolution of the brain not only overshot the needs of prehistoric man, it is the only example of evolution providing a species with an…
• In the meantime, the educated public continues to believe that Darwin has provided all the relevant answers by the magic formula of random mutations plus…
• When a chess player looks at the board, he does not see a static mosaic, a 'still life', but a magnetic field of forces, charged…
• No writer or teacher or artist can escape the responsibility of influencing others whether he intends to or not, whether he is conscious of it…
• Scientists are peeping toms at the keyhole of eternity.
• Nobody before the Pythagorean had thought that mathematical relations held the secret of the universe. Twenty-five centuries later, Europe is still blessed and cursed with…
• Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history; at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old…
• If conquerors be regarded as the engine-drivers of History, then the conquerors of thought are perhaps the pointsmen who, less conspicuous to the traveler's eye,…
• Conscious and unconscious experiences do not belong to different compartments of the mind; they form a continuous scale of gradations, of degrees of awareness.
• Newton's apple and Cezanne's apple are discoveries more closely related than they seem.
• If one looks with a cold eye at the mess man has made of his history, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that he…
• The disastrous history of our species indicates the futility of all attempts at a diagnosis which do not take into account the possibility that homo…

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