Arthur Koestler Quotes - Page 2

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• I am not sure whether ethical absolutes exist. But I am sure that we have to act as if they existed or civilization perishes.

  Arthur Koestler

  Civilization, Ethics, Ethical

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• 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 with energy - as Faraday saw the stresses surrounding magnets and currents as curves in space; or as Van Gogh saw vortices in the skies of Provence.

  Arthur Koestler

  Stress, Player, Curves

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• Without the hard little bits of marble which are called 'facts' or 'data' one cannot compose a mosaic; what matters, however, are not so much the individual bits, but the successive patterns into which you arrange them, then break them up and rearrange them.

  Arthur Koestler

  What Matters, Data, Facts

  Arthur Koestler (1964). “The Act of Creation”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

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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 resonance. The individual is not a killer, the group is, and by identifying with it, the individual becomes one. This is the infernal dialect reflected in man's history.

  Arthur Koestler

  Passion, Men, History

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• 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 their heritage. To non-European civilizations, the idea that numbers are the key to both wisdom and power, seems never to have occurred.

  Arthur Koestler

  Wisdom, Blessed, Power

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• I believe that the evidence for telepathy is overwhelming and that it is a part of reality that is above science. Science allows us to glimpse [only] fragments of reality.

  Arthur Koestler

  Believe, Reality, Glimpse

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• War is a ritual, a deadly ritual, not the result of aggressive self-assertion, but of self-transcending identification. Without loyalty to tribe, church, flag or ideal, there would be no wars.

  Arthur Koestler

  Loyalty, War, Self

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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, 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 the chain and comes up at the other end, guided by invisible links.

  Arthur Koestler

  Giving, Intuition, Links

  Arthur Koestler (1969). “The Act of Creation”

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• Among all forms of mentation, verbal thinking is the most articulate, the most complex, and the most vulnerable to infectious diseases. It is liable to absorb whispered suggestions, and to incorporate them as hidden persuaders into the code.

  Arthur Koestler

  Thinking, Suggestions, Disease

  1964 The Act of Creation.

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• The inner censor of the mind of the true believer completes the work of the public censor; his self-discipline is as tyrannical as the obedience imposed by the regime; he terrorizes his own conscience into submission;he carries his private Iron Curtain inside his skull, to protect his illusions against the intrusion of reality.

  Arthur Koestler

  Reality, Self, Iron

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• 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 has been afflicted by some built-in mental disorder which drives him towards self-destruction. Murder within the species on an individual or collective scale is a phenomenon unknown in the whole animal kingdom, except for man, and a few varieties of ants and rats.

  Arthur Koestler

  Eye, Men, Animal

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

  Arthur Koestler

  Temptation, Satan, Dangerous

  Arthur Koestler (1955). “Darkness at noon”

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• The Revolutionary's Utopia, which in appearance represents a complete break with the past, is always modeled on some image of the Lost Paradise, of a legendary Golden Age... All utopias are fed from the source of mythology; the social engineers' blueprints are merely revised editions of the ancient text.

  Arthur Koestler

  Past, Atheism, Age

  Andre Gide, Richard Wright, Ignasio Silone, Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler, Louis Fischer (1965). “the god that failed”

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• The real achievement in discoveries... is seeing an analogy where no one saw one before... The essence of discovery is that unlikely marriage of cabbages and kings — of previously unrelated frames of reference or universes of discourse — whose union will solve the previously insoluble problem.

  Arthur Koestler

  Real, Science, Discovery

  "The Act of Creation".

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• Conscious and unconscious experiences do not belong to different compartments of the mind; they form a continuous scale of gradations, of degrees of awareness.

  Arthur Koestler

  Mind, Degrees, Different

  Arthur Koestler (1964). “The Act of Creation”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

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• Zen is to religion what a Japanese "rock garden" is to a garden. Zen knows no god, no afterlife, no good and no evil, as the rock-garden knows no flowers, herbs or shrubs. It has no doctrine or holy writ: its teaching is transmitted mainly in the form of parables as ambiguous as the pebbles in the rock-garden which symbolise now a mountain, now a fleeting tiger. When a disciple asks "What is Zen?", the master's traditional answer is "Three pounds of flax" or "A decaying noodle" or "A toilet stick" or a whack on the pupil's head.

  Arthur Koestler

  Flower, Teaching, Garden

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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. It provides the neatest paradigm of the bisociation of previously separate contexts, engineered by fate. Coincidences are puns of destiny. In the pun, two strings of thought are tangled into one acoustic knot; in the coincidental happening, two strings of events are knitted together by invisible hands.

  Arthur Koestler

  Fate, Destiny, Hands

  "Bricks to Babel". Book by Arthur Koestler, 1980.

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• ...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 to the flag, a leader, a religeous faith or political conviction.

  Arthur Koestler

  Selfish, Sacrifice, Leader

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• Innovation is a twofold threat to academic mediocrities: it endangers their oracular authority, and it evokes the deeper fear that their whole, laboriously constructed intellectual edifice might collapse.

  Arthur Koestler

  Fear, Innovation, Intellectual

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• Aggressiveness is not the main trouble with the human species, but rather an excess capacity for fanatical devotion.

  Arthur Koestler

  Excess, Trouble, Devotion

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• Habit is the denial of creativity and the negation of freedom; a self-imposed straitjacket of which the wearer is unaware.

  Arthur Koestler

  Creativity, Self, Empathy

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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 the magic aura are not dealt with rationally but by a specific type of pseudo-reasoning. Absurdities and contradictions are made acceptable by specious rationalizations.

  Arthur Koestler

  Mind, Magic, Atheism

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• The ultimate truth is penultimately always a falsehood. He who will be proved right in the end appears to be wrong and harmful before it.

  Arthur Koestler

  Truth, Ends, Ultimate

  Arthur Koestler (2015). “Darkness at Noon”, p.97, Simon and Schuster

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• The principle that the end justifies the means is and remains the only rule of political ethics; anything else is just a vague chatter and melts away between one’s fingers.

  Arthur Koestler

  Mean, Political, Principles

  ARTHUR KOESTLER (1941). “DARKNESS AT NOON”

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• The story of the Khazar Empire, as it slowly emerges from the past, begins to look like the most cruel hoax which history has ever perpetrated.

  Arthur Koestler

  Past, Looks, Stories

  Arthur Koestler (1976). “The thirteenth tribe: the Khazar empire and its heritage”, Random House Inc

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