Arthur Koestler Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

“Courage is never to let your actions be influenced by your fears.”
-- Arthur Koestler

#Courage #Business #Thought Provoking

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

#Believe #Writing #Shut Up

“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

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

#Struggle #Mean #Language

“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

#Men #Brain #Example

“The most persistent sound which reverberates through man's history is the beating of war drums.”
-- Arthur Koestler

#Military #War #Men

“The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.”
-- Arthur Koestler

#Inspirational #Education #Business

“Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.”
-- Arthur Koestler

#Inspiring #Teacher #Learning

“Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion.”
-- Arthur Koestler

#Motivational #Death #Motivation

“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 #Mosaics

“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

“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

“The principle mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.”
-- Arthur Koestler

#Carpe Diem #Perfection #Principles

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

#Art #Originality #Forget

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

#God #Running #Hook

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

#Stars #Faces #Empty

“True creativity often starts where language ends.”
-- Arthur Koestler

#Business #Creativity #Language

“Creativity is the defeat of habit by originality.”
-- Arthur Koestler

#Creativity #Originality #Defeat

“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

“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

“One may not regard the world as a sort of metaphysical brothel for emotions.”
-- Arthur Koestler

#World #May #Emotion

“The individual is not a killer, but the group is, and by identifying with it the individual is transformed into a killer.”
-- Arthur Koestler

#Society #Groups #Killers

“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.”
-- Arthur Koestler

#Ambition #Years #Hundred

“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

#Philosophy #Thinking #Psychology

“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

#Men #Order #Evil

“The continuous disasters of man's history are mainly due to his excessive capacity and urge to become identified with a tribe, nation, church or cause, and to espouse its credo uncritically and enthusiastically, even if its tenets are contrary to reason, devoid of self-interest and detrimental to the claims of self-preservation.We are thus driven to the unfashionable conclusion that the trouble with our species is not an excess of aggression, but an excess capacity for fanatical devotion.”
-- Arthur Koestler

#Men #Self #Church

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

#Self #Individual #Tendencies

“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

“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

“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