Arthur Koestler Quotes

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

The jester is brother to the sage.

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

The principle mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.

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.

Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion.

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.

Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.

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

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.

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

Brain-washing starts in the cradle.

Creativity is the defeat of habit by originality.

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

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.

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

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

Scientists are peeping toms at the keyhole of eternity.

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.

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

I went to Communism as one goes to a spring of fresh water, and I left Communism as one clambers out of a poisoned river strewn with the wreckage of flooded cities and the corpses of the drowned.

The most persistent sound which reverberates through man's history is the beating of war drums.

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

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

True creativity often starts where language ends.

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

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.

What is an editor but a cross between a fall guy and a father figure? 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.

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

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

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

A writer's ambition should be to trade a hundred contemporary readers for ten readers in ten years' time and for one reader in a hundred years' time.

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.

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

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

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

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

We cannot unthink unless we are insane.

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

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

Coincidence may be described as the chance encounter of two unrelated causal chains which - miraculously, it seems - merge into a significant event.

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

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.

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

The ultimate truth is penultimately a falsehood.

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

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

Honor is decency without vanity.