Arthur Koestler Quotes - Page 4

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The purposiveness of all vital processes, the strategy of the genes and the power of the exploratory drive in animal and man, all seem to indicate that the pull of the future is as real as the pressure of the past.

Arthur Koestler

Real, Animal, Past

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man has an irrepressible tendency to read meaning into the buzzing confusion of sights and sounds impinging on his senses; and where no agreed meaning can be found, he will provide it out of his own imagination.

Arthur Koestler

Men, Sight, Imagination

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The new frontiers to be conquered are mainly in the convolutions of the cortex.

Arthur Koestler

New Frontiers, Frontiers

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Of all forms of mental activity, the most difficult to induce even in the minds of the young, who may be presumed not to have lost their flexibility, is the art of handling the same bundle of data as before, but placing them in a new system of relations with one another by giving them a different framework, all of which virtually means putting on a different kind of thinking-cap for the moment. It is easy to teach anybody a new fact...but it needs light from heaven above to enable a teacher to break the old framework in which the student is accustomed to seeing.

Arthur Koestler

Teacher, Art, Mean

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Man's destiny was no longer determined from 'above' by a super-human wisdom and will, but from 'below' by the sub-human agencies of glands, genes, atoms, or waves of probability. ...they could determine his fate, but could provide him with no moral guidance, no values and meaning. A puppet of the Gods is a tragic figure, a puppet suspended on his chromosomes is merely grotesque.

Arthur Koestler

Fate, Destiny, Men

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

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In the pun, two strings of thought are tangled into one acoustic knot.

Arthur Koestler

Two, Tangled, Coincidence In Life

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Some tribes [of monkeys] have taken to washing potatoes in the river before eating them, others have not. Sometimes migrating groups of potato-washers meet non-washers, and the two groups watch each other's strange behavior with apparent bewilderment. But unlike the inhabitants of Lilliput, who fought holy crusades over the question at which end to break the egg, the potato-washing monkeys do not go to war with the non-washers, because the poor creatures have no language which would enable them to declare washing a diving commandment and eating unwashed potatoes a deadly heresy.

Arthur Koestler

War, Taken, Eggs

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Snobbery is not merely a silly human weakness but something basic in the mentality of modern man-a symptom which reflects the general sickness, the dislocation of social and cultural values in contemporary civilization.

Arthur Koestler

Silly, Men, Civilization

Arthur Koestler (1955). “The trail of the dinosaur & other essays”

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in the course of the last century science has become so dizzy with its successes, that it has forgotten to ask the pertinent questions- or refused to ask them under the pretext that they are meaningless, and in any case not the scientists concern.

Arthur Koestler

Pertinent Questions, Society, Lasts

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In my youth I regarded the universe as an open book, printed in the language of equations, whereas now it appears to me as a text written in invisible ink, of which in our rare moments of grace we are able to decipher a small segment.

Arthur Koestler

Book, Grace, Ink

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The moment of truth, the sudden emergence of a new insight, is an act of intuition.

Arthur Koestler

Intuition, Moments, Short Circuit

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

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Creativity in science could be described as the act of putting two and two together to make five

Arthur Koestler

Creativity, Two, Together

1964 The Act of Creation.

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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 natural selection -quite unaware of the fact that random mutations turned out to be irrelevant and natural selection tautology.

Arthur Koestler

Believe, Knowledge, Magic

"Janus: A Summing Up". Book by Arthur Koestler, p. 184-5, 1983.

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The Régime did not want Communists; it wanted robots. It will take at least a generation to change them back into humans again.

Arthur Koestler

Robots, Generations, Want

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

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Our Press and our schools cultivate Chauvinism, militarism, dogmatism, conformism and ignorance. The arbitrary power of the Government is unlimited, and unexampled in history; freedom of the Press, of opinion and of movement are as thoroughly exterminated as though the proclamation of the Rights of Man had never been. We have built up the most gigantic police apparatus, with informers made a national institution, and the most refined scientific system of political and mental torture. We whip the groaning masses of the country towards a theoretical future happiness, which only we can.

Arthur Koestler

Country, School, Ignorance

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Indeed, the ideal for a well-functioning democratic state is like the ideal for a gentleman's well-cut suit it is not noticed. For the common people of Britain, Gestapo and concentration camps have approximately the same degree of reality as the monster of Loch Ness. Atrocity propaganda is helpless against this healthy lack of imagination.

Arthur Koestler

Cutting, Reality, Imagination

"A Challenge to 'Knights in Rusty Armor". The New York Times, February 14, 1943.

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Prometheus is reaching out for the stars with an empty grin on his face.

Arthur Koestler

Stars, Faces, Empty

Arthur Koestler (1981). “Kaleidoscope: essays from Drinkers of infinity, and The heel of Achilles and later pieces and stories”, Vintage

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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.

Arthur Koestler

Two, Encounters, May

"Bricks to Babel: Selected Writings". Book by Arthur Koestler, 1980.

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It is impossible to decide whether a particular detail of the Pythagorean universe was the work of the master, or filled in by a pupil a remark which equally applies to Leonardo or Michelangelo . But there can be no doubt that the basic features were conceived by a single mind; that Pythagoras of Samos was both the founder of a new religious philosophy, and the founder of Science, as the word is understood today.

Arthur Koestler

Religious, Philosophy, Filled In

Arthur Koestler (2017). “The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe”, p.27, Penguin UK

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The more backwoodish a social group, juvenile or adult, the stricter its conception of the normal, and the readier it will ridicule any departure from it.

Arthur Koestler

Society, Adults, Groups

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

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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 to the evidence. Let Oedipus triumph over gravity; he won't triumph over his fate.

Arthur Koestler

Lying, Fate, Technology

1953 'The Boredomof Fantasy', collected in The Trail of the Dinosaur (1955), pt.2.

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The definition of the individual was: a multitude of one million divided by one million.

Arthur Koestler

Individuality, Definitions, Multitudes

Darkness at Noon (1941) (translation by Daphne Hardy)

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Space-ships and time machines are no escape from the human condition.

Arthur Koestler

Space, Machines, Ships

1953 'The Boredomof Fantasy', collected in The Trail of the Dinosaur (1955), pt.2.

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Most of us were not afraid of death, only of the act of dying; and there were times when we overcame even this fear. At such moments we were free-men without shadows, dismissed from the ranks of the mortal; it was the most complete experience of freedom that can be granted a man.

Arthur Koestler

Men, Shadow, Dying

Arthur Koestler (2011). “Dialogue with Death: The Journal of a Prisoner of the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War”, p.204, University of Chicago Press

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If there is a lesson in our story it is that the manipulation, according to strictly self-consistent rules, of a set of symbols representing one single aspect of the phenomena may produce correct, verifiable predictions, and yet completely ignore all other aspects whose ensemble constitutes reality.

Arthur Koestler

Reality, Self, May

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

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Born: September 5, 1905
Died: March 1, 1983
Occupation: Author
Cite this Page: Citation

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