110+ Arthur Koestler Quotes On Education, Religion And World

Arthur Koestler was a Hungarian novelist and political activist. He was a prolific writer and wrote books on a variety of topics including science, philosophy, and politics. Koestler is best known for his novel Darkness at Noon, which is a fictionalized account of the Moscow show trials of the 1930s. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Arthur Koestler on education, life, religion.

Top 10 Arthur Koestler Quotes

1. Courage is never to let your actions be influenced by your fears.
2. The jester is brother to the sage.
3. The principle mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.
4. Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion.
5. 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.
6. Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.
7. In any language it is a struggle to make a sentence say exactly what you mean.
8. 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.
9. If power corrupts, the reverse is also true; persecution corrupts the victims though perhaps in subtler and more tragic ways.
10. The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.

Arthur Koestler Short Quotes

• Two half-truths do not make a truth, and two half- cultures do not make a culture
• Scientists are peeping toms at the keyhole of eternity.
• 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.
• A publisher who writes is like a cow in a milk bar.
• If the creator had a purpose in equipping us with a neck, he surely meant us to stick it out.
• What is an editor but a cross between a fall guy and a father figure? arthur koestler
• Prometheus is reaching out for the stars with an empty grin on his face.
• We cannot unthink unless we are insane.
• The moment of truth, the sudden emergence of a new insight, is an act of intuition.

Arthur Koestler Quotes About Life

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

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

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

The progress of science is strewn, like an ancient desert trail, with the bleached skeleton of discarded theories which once seemed to possess eternal life. — 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

Arthur Koestler Quotes About Death

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

Death tripped down the corridor, changing step, struck out here and there, danced pirouettes; often I felt his breath on my face when he was miles away; often I fell asleep and dreamed while he stood leaning over my bed. — 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

Arthur Koestler Quotes About Mark

In creating the human brain, evolution has wildly overshot the mark. — Arthur Koestler

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

Laughter and weeping, the Greek masks of comedy and tragedy, mark the extremes of a continuous spectrum; both provide channels for the overflow of emotion; both are — Arthur Koestler

Arthur Koestler Quotes About Originality

Creativity is the defeat of habit by originality. — Arthur Koestler

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

Learn from the mistakes of others. You can't live long enough to make them all yourself. Boredom sets into boring minds. The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards. — Arthur Koestler

Arthur Koestler Quotes About Individual

The evils of mankind are caused, not by the primary aggressiveness of individuals, but by their self-transcending identification with groups whose common denominator is low intelligence and high emotionality. — Arthur Koestler

The integrative tendencies of the individual are incomparably more dangerous than his self-assertive tendencies. — 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 definition of the individual was: a multitude of one million divided by one million. — Arthur Koestler

Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual. — Arthur Koestler

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

Arthur Koestler Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

Somebody once asked Niels Bohr why he had a horseshoe hanging above the front door of his house. Surely you, a world famous physicist, can't really believe that hanging a horseshoe above your door brings you luck? Of course not, Bohr replied, but I have been reliably informed that it will bring me luck whether I believe in it or not. — 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 cabbages and kings — of previously unrelated frames of reference or universes of discourse — whose union will solve the previously insoluble problem. — 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

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

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

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

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

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. — 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

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

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

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

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

...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

Innovation is a twofold threat to academic mediocrities: it endangers their oracular authority, and it evokes the deeper fear that their whole, laboriously constructed intellectual edifice might collapse. — 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

[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

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

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

The ultimate truth is penultimately a falsehood. — 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

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

True creativity often starts where language ends. — Arthur Koestler

Wherever we find orderly, stable systems in Nature, we find that they are hierarchically structured, for the simple reason that without such structuring of complex systems into sub-assemblies, there could be no order and stability- except the order of a dead universe filled with a uniformly distributed gas. — Arthur Koestler

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the psychological point of view, the self-asserting emotions, derived from emergency reactions, involve a narrowing of consciousness; the participatory emotions an expansion of consciousness by identificatory processes of various kinds. — Arthur Koestler

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

If one looks with a cold eye at the mess man has made of 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. — 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

Wars are not fought for territory, but for words. Man's deadliest weapon is language. He is as susceptible to being hypnotized by slogans as he is to infectious diseases. And where there is an epidemic, the group-mind takes over. — Arthur Koestler

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

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

Some of the greatest discoveries...consist mainly in the clearing away of psychological roadblocks which obstruct the approach to reality; which is why,post factum they appear so obvious. — Arthur Koestler

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

To want to meet an author because you like his books is as ridiculous as wanting to meet the goose because you like pate de foie gras. — 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

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

The temptations of God were always more dangerous for mankind than those of Satan. — Arthur Koestler

the self-assertive tendency is the dynamic expression of the holon's wholeness, the integrative tendency, the dynamic expression of its partness. — Arthur Koestler

History knows no scruples and no hesitation. Inert and unerring, she flows towards her goal. At every bend in her course she leaves the mud which she carries and the corpses of the drowned. — Arthur Koestler

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

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

Honor is decency without vanity. — Arthur Koestler

When a person identifies himself with a group his critical faculties are diminished and his passions enhanced by a kind of emotive resonance. The individual is not a killer, the group is, and by identifying with it, the individual becomes one. This is the infernal dialect reflected in man's history. — Arthur Koestler

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

Coincidence may be described as the chance encounter of two unrelated causal chains which-miraculously, it seems-merge into a significant event. It provides the neatest paradigm of the bisociation of previously separate contexts, engineered by fate. Coincidences are puns of destiny. In the pun, two strings of thought are tangled into one acoustic knot; in the coincidental happening, two strings of events are knitted together by invisible hands. — Arthur Koestler

We know that virtue does not matter to history, and that crimes remain unpunished; but that every error had its consequences and venges itself unto the seventh generation. — Arthur Koestler

You can't help people being right for the wrong reasons...This fear of finding oneself in bad company is not an expression of political purity; it is an expression of a lack of self-confidence. — 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

Show us not the aim without the way. For ends and means on earth are so entangled That changing one, you change the other too; Each different path brings other ends in view — Arthur Koestler

The fact is: I no longer believe in my own infallibility. That is why I am lost. — 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

The disastrous history of our species indicates the futility of all attempts at a diagnosis which do not take into account the possibility that homo sapiens is a victim of one of evolution's countless mistakes. — Arthur Koestler

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

The moment of truth, the sudden emergence of a new insight, is an act of intuition. Such intuitions give the appearance of miraculous flushes, or short-circuits of reasoning. In fact they may be likened to an immersed chain, of which only the beginning and the end are visible above the surface of consciousness. The diver vanishes at one end of the chain and comes up at the other end, guided by invisible links. — 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

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

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

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

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

The cell door slammed behind Rubishov. — Arthur Koestler

...the cosmology of a given age is not the result of unilinear, "scientific" development, but rather the most striking, imaginative symbol of its mentality- the projection of its conflicts, prejudice and specific ways of double-think onto the graceful sky. — Arthur Koestler

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

Brain-washing starts in the cradle. — Arthur Koestler

Every creative act – in science, art, or religion – involves a regression to a more primitive level, a new innocence of perception liberated from the cataract of accepted beliefs. — Arthur Koestler

Life Lessons by Arthur Koestler

1. Arthur Koestler teaches us to remain open-minded and to question the status quo, as he often explored controversial topics in his works.
2. He also encourages us to be resilient and to keep striving for our goals, as he overcame many obstacles throughout his life.
3. Lastly, Koestler reminds us to be kind and generous to others, as he was a passionate advocate for human rights.