Arthur Koestler Quotes & Sayings

What is an editor but a cross between a fall guy and a father figure? arthur koestler — Arthur Koestler

The temptation, which consisted of a single word written on the cemetary of the defeated: Sleep. — Arthur Koestler

The hangman is a disgrace to any civilized country. — Arthur Koestler

If power corrupts, the reverse is also true; persecution corrupts the victims though perhaps in subtler and more tragic ways. — Arthur Koestler

In my youth I regarded the Universe as an open book, printed in the language of physical 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 fragment. — Arthur Koestler

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

Generally speaking, words like 'agent of,' 'Democracy,' 'Freedom,' etc. meant something quite different in Party usage from what they meant in general usage; and as, furthermore, even their Party meaning changed with each shift of the line, our polemical methods became rather like the croquet game of the Queen of Hearts, in which the hoops moved about the field and the balls were live hedgehogs. With this difference, that when a player missed his turn and the Queen shouted 'Off with his head,' the order was executed in earnest. To survive, we all had to become virtuosos of Wonderland croquet. — Arthur Koestler

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

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

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 splitting up of the world into the realms of matter and mind, and the identification of 'mind' with conscious thinking. The result of this identification was the shallow rationalism of l' esprit Cartesien, and an impoverishment of psychology which it took three centuries to remedy even in part. — Arthur Koestler

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

The pressure of the environment cramps art as it cramps behaviour. One may challenge this environment, but one has to pay for it, and the price is neurotic guilt. There never was an intelligentsia without a guilt complex; it is the income tax one has to pay for wanting to make others richer. — Arthur Koestler

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

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

The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards. — Arthur Koestler

The Party denied the free will of the individual - and at the same
time it exacted his willing self-sacrifice. It denied his capacity to
choose between two alternatives - and at the same time it demanded that he
should constantly choose the right one. It denied his power to distinguish
good and evil - and at the same time spoke pathetically of guilt and
treachery. The individual stood under the sign of economic fatality, a
wheel in a clockwork which had been wound up for all eternity and could
not be stopped or influenced - and the Party demanded that the wheel
should revolt against the clockwork and change its course. There was
somewhere an error in the calculation; the equation did not work out. — Arthur Koestler

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

I have already thought it over,' said Rubashov. 'I reject your proposition. Logically, you may be right. But I have had enough of this kind of logic. I am tired and I don't want to play this game anymore. Be kind enough to have me taken back to my cell. — Arthur Koestler

Adolescence is a kind of emotional seasickness. Both are funny, but only in retrospect. — Arthur Koestler

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

We whip the groaning masses of the country towards a theoretical future happiness, which only we can see. — Arthur Koestler

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 or not. — Arthur Koestler

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

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

Rubashov had always believed that he knew himself rather well. Being without moral prejudices, he had no illusions about the phenomenon called the "first person singular" and had taken for granted, without particular emotion, that this phenomenon was endowed with certain impulses which people are generally reluctant to admit. Now, when he stood with his forehead against the window or suddenly stopped on the third black tile, he made unexpected discoveries. He found that those processes wrongly known as monologues are really dialogues of a special kind - dialogues in which one partner remains silent while the other, against all grammatical rules, addresses him as "I" instead of "you," in order to creep into his confidence and to fathom his intentions, but the silent partner just remains silent, shuns observation, and even refuses to be localized in time and space. — Arthur Koestler

On the historical scale, the damages wrought by individual violence for selfish motives are insignificant compared to the holocausts resulting from self-transcending devotion to collectively shared belief-systems. It is derived from primitive identification instead of mature social integration; it entails the partial surrender of personal responsibility and produces the quasi-hypnotic phenomena of group-psychology. — Arthur Koestler

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

One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up. — Arthur Koestler

Hitherto man had to live with the idea of death as an individual; from now onward mankind will have to live with the idea of its death as a species. — Arthur Koestler

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 organ which it does not know how to use. — Arthur Koestler

When one contemplates the streak of insanity running through human history, it appears highly probable that homo sapiens is a biological freak, the result of some remarkable mistake in the evolutionary process. The ancient doctrine of original sin, variants of which occur independently in the mythologies of diverse cultures, could be a reflection of man's awareness of his own inadequacy, of the intuitive hunch that somewhere along the line of his ascent something has gone wrong. — Arthur Koestler

History had a slow pulse; man counted in years, history in generations — Arthur Koestler

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

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

A sadist is a person who is kind to a masochist. — Arthur Koestler

Had not history always been an inhumane, unscrupulous builder, mixing its mortar of lies, blood and mud? — Arthur Koestler

We find in the history of ideas mutations which do not seem to correspond to any obvious need, and at first sight appear as mere playful whimsies such as Apollonius' work on conic sections, or the non-Euclidean geometries, whose practical value became apparent only later. — Arthur Koestler

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

One of the tests of a theory is that, once grasped, it appears self-evident. — Arthur Koestler

Ivanov- "Up to now , all revolutions have been made by moralizing diletantes. They were always in good faith and perished because of their dilettantism. We for the first time are consequent ... "
"Yes," said Rubashov. "So consequent, that in the interests of a just distribution of land we deliberately let die of starvation about five million farmers and their families in one year. So consequent were we in the liberation of human beings from the shackles of industrial exploitation that we sent about ten million people to do forced labour in the Artic regions and the jungles of the East, under conditions similar to those of antique galley slaves. So consequent that, to settle a difference of opinion, we know only one argument: death, whether it is a matter of submarines, manure, or the Party line to be followed in Indo-China ... — Arthur Koestler

I don't approve of mixing ideologies," Ivanov continued. "There are only two conceptions of human ethics, and they are at opposite poles. One of them is Christian and humane, declares the individual to be sacrosanct, and asserts that the rules of arithmetic are not to be applied to human units. The other starts from the basic principle that a collective aim justifies all means, and not only allows, but demands, that the individual should in every way be subordinated and sacrificed to the community
which may dispose of it as an experimentation rabbit or a sacrificial lamb. The first conception could be called anti-vivisection morality, the second, vivisection morality. Humbugs and dilettantes have always tried to mix the two conceptions; in practice, it is impossible. — Arthur Koestler

Chemically induced hallucinations, delusions and raptures may be frightening or wonderfully gratifying; in either case they are in the nature of confidence tricks played on one's own nervous system. — Arthur Koestler

Newton's apple and Cezanne's apple are discoveries more closely related than they seem. — Arthur Koestler

What had he said to them? "I bow my knees before the country, before the masses, before the whole people ... " And what then? What happened to these masses, to this people? For forty years it had been driven through the desert, with threats and promises, with imaginary terrors and imaginary rewards. But where was the Promised Land? Did there really exist any such goal for this wandering mankind? That was a question to which he would have liked an answer before it was too late. Moses had not been allowed to enter the land of promise either, But he had been allowed to see it, from the top of the mountain, spread at his feet. Thus, it was easy to die, with the visible certainty of one's goal before one's eyes. He, Nicolas Salmanovitch Rubashov, had not been taken to the top of a mountain; and wherever his eye looked, he saw nothing but desert and the darkness of night. — Arthur Koestler

Israel's rebirth as a nation after two thousand years is a freak phenomenon of history. But in all the branches of science the observation of freak phenomena yields important clues to general laws. Dwarf stars and human giants, radioactivity and parthenogenesis, prophets, maniacs and saints are all freaks which carry the conditions of normality to a pointed and profiled extreme. So does this race of eternal victims with its flayed skin and exposed nerves, which demonstrates, with the horrible precision of an anatomic atlas, a condition of man otherwise mercifully hidden from us. — Arthur Koestler

The life we led was a proof of man's capacity for adaptation.I think that even the condemned souls in purgatory after time develop a sort of homely routine.That is ,by the way, why most prison memoirs are unreadable.The difficulty of conveying to the reader an idea of a nightmare world from which he has emerged makes the author depict the prisoner's state of mind as an uninterruped continuity of despair.He fears to appear frivolous or to spoil his effect by admitting that even in the depths of misery cheerfulness keeps breaking in. — Arthur Koestler

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. — Arthur Koestler

[My father] loved me tenderly and shyly from a distance, and later on took a naive pride in seeing my name in print. — Arthur Koestler

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

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

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

The 'gallows' are not only a symbol of death, but also a symbol of cruelty, terror and irreverence for life; the common denominator of primitive savagery, medieval fanaticism and modern totalitarianism. — Arthur Koestler

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

Satan, on the contrary, is thin, ascetic and a fanatical devotee of logic. He reads Machiavelli, Ignatius of Loyola, Marx and Hegel; he is cold and unmerciful to mankind, out of a kind of mathematical mercifulness. He is damned always to do that which is most repugnant to him: to become a slaughterer, in order to abolish slaughtering, to sacrifice lambs so that no more lambs may be slaughtered, to whip people with knouts so that they may learn not to let themselves be whipped, to strip himself of every scruple in the name of a higher scrupulousness, and to challenge the hatred of mankind because of his love for it
an abstract and geometric love. — Arthur Koestler

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

There is an abundance of ancient place names in the Ukraine and Poland, which derive from 'Khazar' or 'Zhid' (Jew). — Arthur Koestler

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

The real achievement in discoveries ... is seeing an analogy where no one saw one before.. The essence of discovery is that unlikely marriage of ... previously unrelated forms of reference or universes of discourse, whose union will solve the previously insoluble problem. — Arthur Koestler

The principal mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers. — Arthur Koestler

Persuasion may play a part in a man's conversion; but only the part of bringing to its full and conscious climax a process which has been maturing in regions where no persuasion can penetrate. A faith is not acquired; it grows like a tree. — Arthur Koestler

In the index to the six hundred odd pages of Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History, abridged version, the names of Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes and Newton do not occur yet their cosmic quest destroyed the medieval vision of an immutable social order in a walled-in universe and transformed the European landscape, society, culture, habits and general outlook, as thoroughly as if a new species had arisen on this planet. — Arthur Koestler

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

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

In any language it is a struggle to make a sentence say exactly what you mean. — Arthur Koestler

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

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

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

That man is a reality, mankind an abstraction; that 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; that the end justifies the means only within very narrow limits; that ethics is not a function of social utility, and charity not a petty bourgeois sentiment but the gravitational force which keeps civilization in its orbit. — Arthur Koestler

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

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

History has taught us that often lies serve her better than the truth; for man is sluggish and has to be led through the desert for forty years before each step in his development. And he has to be driven through the desert with threats and promises, by imaginary terrors and imaginary consolations, so that he should not sit down prematurely to rest and divert himself by worshipping golden calves. — Arthur Koestler

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

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

Every error has its consequences and venges itself unto the seventh generation. — Arthur Koestler

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

With you, thought Rubashov and looked at the whitewashed wall behind which the other stood - in the meantime he had
probably lit a cigarette and was blowing the smoke against the wall - with you I have no accounts to settle. To you I owe
no fare. Between you and us there is no common currency and no common language. ... Well, what do you want now? — Arthur Koestler

You opposed fascism, then you ditched communism.
'No, I didn't. Communism ditched me by turning into Stalinism'. — Arthur Koestler

Each wrong idea we follow is a crime committed against future generations. — Arthur Koestler

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

History is a priori amoral; it has no conscience. — Arthur Koestler

Two half truths do not make a truth. — Arthur Koestler

A publisher who writes is like a cow in a milk bar. — Arthur Koestler

Modern man lives isolated in his artificial environment, not because the artificial is evil as such, but because of his lack of comprehension of the forces which make it work- of the principles which relate his gadgets to the forces of nature, to the universal order. It is not central heating which makes his existence 'unnatural,' but his refusal to take an interest in the principles behind it. By being entirely dependent on science, yet closing his mind to it, he leads the life of an urban barbarian. — Arthur Koestler

Much depends on asking the right question at the right time. — Arthur Koestler

Our White - Whites were a mixed crowd,including a well - known doctor,owner of a chateau near Versailles,an opera singer with an enormous belly and a chaplainbass;a homosexual architect with a beard,two night club porters,and a lawyer who sold Jewish refugees visas for a Central American Republic,which on arrival turned out to be non valid. — Arthur Koestler

God seems to have left the receiver off the hook and time is running out. — Arthur Koestler

History knows no scruples and no hesitation. Inert and unnering flows towards her goal. History knows herway. She makes no mistakes. — Arthur Koestler

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

Perhaps he did not know himself - like all these intellectual cynics ... — Arthur Koestler

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

Courage is never to let your actions be influenced by your fears. — Arthur Koestler

We cannot unthink unless we are insane. — Arthur Koestler

Coincidence may be described as the chance encounter of two unrelated causal chains which — Arthur Koestler

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

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

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

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 one, that the end justifies the means. — Arthur Koestler

Every jump of technical progress leaves the relative intellectual development of the masses a step behind, and thus causes a fall in the political-maturity thermometer. It takes sometimes tens of years, sometimes generations, for a people's level of understanding gradually to adapt itself to the changed state of affairs, until it has recovered the same capacity for self-government as it had already possessed at a lower stage of civilization. — Arthur Koestler

The creative act does not create something out of nothing; it uncovers, selects, reshuffles, combines, synthesizes already existing facts, ideas, faculties, and skills. — Arthur Koestler

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, determine the direction of the journey. — Arthur Koestler