Arthur Koestler Quotes - Page 3

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• One may not regard the world as a sort of metaphysical brothel for emotions.

  Arthur Koestler

  World, May, Emotion

  'Darkness at Noon' (1940) 'The Second Hearing' ch. 7

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• God is dethroned; and although the incognizant masses are tardy in realizing the event, they feel the icy draught caused by that vacancy. Man enters upon a spiritual ice age; the established churches can no longer provide more than Eskimo huts where their shivering flock huddles together.

  Arthur Koestler

  Spiritual, Men, Ice

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• Men cannot be treated as units in operations of political arithmetic because they behave like the symbols for zero and the infinite , which dislocate all mathematical operations.

  Arthur Koestler

  Zero, Men, Political

  Arthur Koestler (2011). “Dialogue with Death: The Journal of a Prisoner of the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War”, p.12, University of Chicago Press

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• In the social equation, the value of a single life is nil; in the cosmic equation, it is infinite... Not only communism, but any political movement which implicitly relies on purely utilitarian ethics, must become a victim to the same fatal error. It is a fallacy as naïve as a mathematical teaser, and yet its consequences lead straight to Goya's Disasters, to the reign of the guillotine, the torture chambers of the Inquisition, or the cellars of the Lubianka.

  Arthur Koestler

  Errors, Political, Single Life

  Arthur Koestler (1952). “Arrow in the blue: an autobiography”

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• God seems to have left the receiver off the hook and time is running out.

  Arthur Koestler

  God, Running, Religious

  'The Ghost in the Machine' (1967) ch. 18

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• Two half-truths do not make a truth, and two half- cultures do not make a culture

  Arthur Koestler

  Two, Culture, Half

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• Faith is a wondrous thing; it is not only capable of moving mountains, but also of making you believe that a herring is a race horse.

  Arthur Koestler

  Faith, Horse, Believe

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

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• The prerequisite of originality is the art of forgetting, at the proper moment, what we know.

  Arthur Koestler

  Art, Creativity, Originality

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

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• History had a slow pulse; man counted in years, history in generations

  Arthur Koestler

  Men, Years, Pulse

  Arthur Koestler (2015). “Darkness at Noon”, p.265, Simon and Schuster

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• The creativity and pathology of the human mind are, after all, two sides of the same medal coined in the evolutionary mint. The first is responsible for the splendour of our cathedrals, the second for the gargoyles that decorate them to remind us that the world is full of monsters, devils, and succubi.

  Arthur Koestler

  Creativity, Two Sides, Mind

  Arthur Koestler, Harold Harris (1975). “Astride the two cultures: Arthur Koestler at 70”, Not Avail

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• I have repeatedly stressed that the selfish impulses of man constitute a much less historic danger than his integrative tendencies. To put it in the simplest way: the individual who indulges in an excess of aggressive self-assertiveness incurs the penalties of society-he outlaws himself, he contracts out of the hierarchy. The true believer, on the other hand, becomes more closely knit into it; he enters the womb of his church, or party, or whatever the social holon to which he surrenders his identity.

  Arthur Koestler

  Selfish, Party, Men

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• The integrative tendencies of the individual operate through the mechanisms of empathy, sympathy, projection, introjection, identification, worship- all of which make him feel that he is a part of some larger entity which transcends the boundaries of the individual self. This psychological urge to belong, to participate, to commune is as primary and real as its opposite. The all-important question is the nature of that higher entity of which the individual feels himself a part.

  Arthur Koestler

  Real, Self, Opposites

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• One question that people always ask at home is never asked here: "What happened to Communism in Russia?" Everybody yawns when a visitor brings it up, because the answer is so obvious to every Russian. The answer is that there never was Communism in Russia; there were only communists.

  Arthur Koestler

  Home, Russia, People

  Arthur Koestler (1970). “The trail of the dinosaur: and Reflections on hanging”, Random House (UK)

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• To sell oneself for thirty pieces of silver is an honest transaction; but to sell oneself to one s own conscience is to abandon mankind.

  Arthur Koestler

  Pieces, Honest, Silver

  Arthur Koestler (1955). “Darkness at noon”

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• The integrative tendencies of the individual are incomparably more dangerous than his self-assertive tendencies.

  Arthur Koestler

  Self, Individual, Tendencies

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• 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 invisible agents and innocent germ carriers, by the most varied forms of contact, or simply by breathing the common air.

  Arthur Koestler

  Book, Epidemics, Air

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• When reality becomes unbearable, the mind must withdraw from it and create a world of artificial perfection. Plato's world of pure Ideas and Forms, which alone is to be considered as real, whereas the world of nature which we perceive is merely its cheap Woolworth copy, is a flight into delusion.

  Arthur Koestler

  Plato, Real, Ideas

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• If the creator has a purpose in equipping us with a neck, he surely would have meant for us to stick it out.

  Arthur Koestler

  Courage, Innovation, Purpose

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• 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 design of the Hellenic or Mongolic expansion; but the Alexanders of philosophy and religion, of science and art, seem less expendable; their impact seems less determined by economic challenges and social pressures; and they seem to have a much wider range of possibilities to influence the direction, shape and texture of civilizations.

  Arthur Koestler

  Art, Philosophy, Past

  "The Sleepwalkeers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe". Book by Arthur Koestler, 1959.

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• When all is said, its atmosphere [England's] still contains fewer germs of aggression and brutality per cubic foot in a crowded bus, pub or queue than in any other country in which I have lived

  Arthur Koestler

  Country, Feet, Atmosphere

  Arthur Koestler (1973). “The lion and the ostrich: the eighth annual lecture under the "Thank-offering to Britain Fund."”, Not Avail

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• No man is an island- he is a holon. A Janus-faced entity who, looking inward, sees himself as a self-contained unique whole, looking outward as a dependent part. His self-assertive tendency is the dynamic manifestation of his unique wholeness, his autonomy and independence as a holon. Its equally universal antagonist, the integrative tendency, expresses his dependence on the larger whole to which he belongs: his 'part-ness.'.

  Arthur Koestler

  Unique, Men, Islands

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• The progress of science, like an ancient desert trail, is strewn with the bleached skeletons of discarded theories, doctrines, and axioms which seemed to possess eternal life.

  Arthur Koestler

  Skeletons, Progress, Desert

  "Kaleidoscope: Essays from "Drinkers of Infinity" and the "Heel of Achilles" and Later Pieces and Stories".

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• 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 the world, God is an anachronism; and every compromise with one’s own conscience is perfidy. When the accursed inner voice speaks to you, hold your hands over your ears….

  Arthur Koestler

  Betrayal, Hands, Voice

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• We cannot unthink unless we are insane.

  Arthur Koestler

  Thinking, Insanity, Insane

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• If time is treated in modern physics as a dimension on a par with the dimensions of space, why should we a priori exclude the possibility that we are pulled as well as pushed along its axis? The future has, after all, as much or as little reality as the past, and there is nothing logically inconceivable in introducing, as a working hypothesis, an element of finality, supplementary to the element of causality, into our equations. It betrays a great lack of imagination to believe that the concept of "purpose" must necessarily be associated with some anthropomorphic deity.

  Arthur Koestler

  Believe, Reality, Past

  "The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe". Book by Arthur Koestler, 1959.

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