Arthur Koestler > Quotes

“A fact, once discovered, leads an existence of its own, and enters into relations with other facts of which their discoverers have never dreamt. Apollonius of Perga discovered the laws of the useless curves which emerge when a plane intersects a cone at various angles: these curves proved, centuries later, to represent the paths followed by planets, comets, rockets, and satellites.

One cannot escape the feeling [wrote Heinrich Herz] that these mathematical formulae have an independent existence and an intelligence of their own, that they are wiser than we are, wiser even than their discoverers, that we get more out of them than was originally put into them.

This confession of the discoverer of radio-waves sounds suspiciously like an echo of Kepler, echoing Plato, echoing Pythagoras: 'Methinks that all of nature and the graceful sky are set into symbols in geomatriam.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

“The philosophy of nature evolved by occasional leaps and bounds alternating with delusional pursuits, culs-de-sac, regressions, periods of blindness, and amnesia. The great discoveries which determined its course were sometimes the unexpected by-products of a chase after quite different hares. At other times, the process of discovery consisted merely in the cleaning away of the rubbish that blocked the path, or in the rearranging of existing items of knowledge in a different pattern.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

“It would indeed seem more expedient to treat the history of thought in terms borrowed from biology..(, with) "evolution" .. a wasteful, fumbling process characterized by sudden mutations of unknown cause, by the slow grinding of selection, and by the dead-ends of overspecialization and rigid inadaptability.. New ideas are thrown up spontaneously like mutations; the vast majority of them are useless crank theories, the equivalent of biological freaks without survival-value. There is a constant struggle for survival between competing theories in every branch of the history of thought. The process of "natural selection", too, has its equivalent in mental evolution: among the multitude of new concepts which emerge only those survive which are well adapted to the period's intellectual milieu. A new theoretical concept will live or die according to whether it can come to terms with this environment..”
― Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

“Let me repeat: to talk of 'directiveness' , or purpose in this limited sense, in ontogeny, has become respectable once more; but to apply these terms to phylogeny is still considered heretical (or at least in bad taste). But phylogeny is an abstraction, which only acquires a concrete meaning when we realise that 'phylogeny, evolutionary descent, is a sequence of ontogenies', and that 'the course of evolution is through changes in ontogeny'. The quotations in the previous sentence are actually also by Simpson and contain the answer to his own conundrum about the Purposer behind the purpose. The Purposer is each and every individual organism, from the inception of life, which struggled and strove to make the best of its limited opportunities.”
― Arthur Koestler

“but the odd fact is that Copernicus had hit on the ellipse which is the form of all planetary orbits - had arrived at it for the wrong reasons and by faulty deduction - and having done so, promptly dropped it: the passage is crossed out in the manuscript, and is not contained in the printed edition of the Revolutions. The history of human thought is full of lucky hits and triumphant eurekas; it is rare to have on record one of the anti-climaxes, the missed opportunity which normally leaves no trace.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

“Philosophy is the gaseous state of thought, Science its liquid state, Religion its rigid state. In all three states doubts are expressed regarding the necessity, and even the possibility, of absolute death. We shall discuss this doubt only in its liquid state. . . .”
― Arthur Koestler, Arrow in the Blue

“In those days the European continent had already reached a stage where a man could be told without irony that he should be thankful to be shot and not strangled, decapitated, or beaten to death.”
― Arthur Koestler, Scum of the Earth

“Every good joke contains an element of the riddle-it may be childishly simple, or subtle and challenging-which the listener must solve. By doing so, he is lifted out of his passive role and compelled to co-operate, to repeat to some extent the process of inventing the joke, to re-create it in his imagination. The type of entertainment dished out by the mass media makes one apt to forget that true recreation is re-creation.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

“The chain, thus unified, now reached from God's throne down to the meanest worm.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

“Valamely politikai álláspont racionális és erkölcsi értékét csak akkor lehet megítélni, ha világosan megkülönböztetjük a politikai libidó elsődleges és másodlagos fejlődését. Az első szakasz szükségképpen irracionális; esetleg valami elsöprő hatású érzelmi élmény uralja, mint például Lenin bátyjának kivégzése vagy az a folyamatos kondicionálás, amelyet az angol "public school"-ok, a bentlakásos magániskolák adnak. Az emberek többsége sosem növi ki ezt a kezdetleges, emotív szakaszt; politikai meggyőződéseink a csecsemőkori fixációk állapotában maradnak. Az, hogy miképp szavaznak egy-egy választáson, körülbelül annyira racionális, mint a neurotikus ember párválasztása.
A második szakasz, ha egyáltalán sor kerül rá, a kétely korszaka: az emotív hit fölött megjelenik, és megerősíti uralmát a kritikai érvelés. Freudi nyelvezetre lefordítva ez megfelel annak a szakasznak, amikor a valóságelv az örömelv fölé kerekedik. Ennek a korszaknak azzal kell végződnie - és olykor-olykor így is végződik -, hogy megjelenik az új, immár érett hit, melyben az ész és az értelem harmóniában olvad össze.”
― Arthur Koestler, Arrow in the Blue

“Freedom of the will is a metaphysical question outside the scope of this book; but considered as a subjective datum of experience, 'free will' is the awareness of alternative choices.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

“The Eureka act proper, the moment of truth experienced by the creative individual, is paralleled on the collective plane by the emergence, out of the scattered fragments, of a new synthesis, brought about by a quick succession of individual discoveries-where, characteristically, the same discovery is often made by several individuals at the same time.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

“The integrative powers of life are manifested in the phenomena of symbiosis between organelles, in the varied forms of partnership within the same species or between different species; in the phenomena of regeneration, in lower species, of complete individuals from their fragments; in the re-formation of scrambled embryonic organs, etc. The self-assertive tendency is equally ubiquitous in the competitive struggle for life.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine

“In the immortal parable of the Cave, where men stand in their chains backs to the light , perceiving only the play of shadows on the wall, unaware that these are but shadows, unaware of the luminous reality outside the Cave-in this allegory of the human condition, Plato hit an archetypal chord as pregnant with echoes as Pythagoras' Harmony of the Spheres. But when we think of Neoplatonism and scholasticism as concrete philosophies and precepts of life, we may be tempted to reverse the game, and to paint a picture of the founders of the Academy and the Lyceum as two frightened men standing in the self-same Cave, facing the wall, chained to their places in a catastrophic age, turning their back on the flame of Greece's heroic era, and throwing grotesque shadows which are to haunt mankind for a thousand years and more.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

“One branch after another of chemistry, physics, and cosmology has merged in the majestic river as it approaches the estuary-to be swallowed up by the ocean, lose its identity, and evaporate into the clouds; the final act of the great vanishing process, and the beginning, one hopes, of a new cycle. It has been said that we know more and more about less and less. It seems that the more universal the 'laws' which we discover, the more elusive they become, and that the ultimate consummation of all rivers of knowledge is in the cloud of unknowing.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

“The fact is: I no longer believe in my infallibility. That is why I am lost.”
― Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon

“The roads that lead man to knowledge are as wondrous as that knowledge itself.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

“Did there realy 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, form 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 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, Darkness at Noon

“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 form of contact, or simply by breathing the common air.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

“While serving one of his countless sentences of imprisonment, he was given ex-wrestler Paul as cell companion. Paul was at that time a dock worker; he was in jail for having, during a strike riot, remembered his professional past and applied the grip known as a double Nelson to a policeman. This grip consisted in passing one's arms through the opponent's arm­pits from behind, locking one's hands behind his neck,
and pressing his head down until the neck vertebra began to crack. In the ring this had always brought him considerable applause, but he had learned to his regret that in the class struggle the double Nelson was not done.”
― Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon

“Bisher war die Arlowa ein Faktor in diesem Kalkül gewesen, relativ gleichgültig gemessen an dem, was auf dem Spiele stand.
Aber die Gleichung ging nicht mehr auf. Die Vorstellung, wie die Beine der Arlowa in den hohen Stöckelschuhen über den Korridor schleiften, sprengte das mathematische Gleichgewicht. Der unbedeutende Faktor wuchs ins Unmeßbare und Absolute; das Wimmern Bogrows, der unmenschliche Klang der Stimme, die seinen Namen gerufen hatte, das dumpfe Tam-Tam der Trommeln brausten in seinen Ohren; sie erstickten die dünne Stimme des logischen Kalküls, deckten sie zu, wie die Brandung das Gurgeln des Ertrinkenden zudeckt.”
― Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon

“Every decision is like a murder, and our march forward is over the stillborn bodies of all our possible selves that will never be.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

“In the ring this had always brought him considerable applause, but he had learned to his regret that in the class struggle the double Nelson was not done.”
― Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon

“Hay dos clases de valentía: la del valiente y la del cobarde”
― Arthur Koestler, Memorias: Flecha en el azul / La escritura invisible

“But there exist other, different, methods of infolding-obliquity, compression, and the Seven Types of Ambiguity-a modest estimate of Empson's. The later Joyce, for instance, makes one realize why the German word for writing poetry is 'dichten'- to condense (certainly more poetical than 'composing', i.e. 'putting together'; but perhaps less poetical than the Hungarian kolteni-to hatch). Freud actually believed that to condense or compress several meanings or allusions into a word or phrase was the essence of poetry. It is certainly an essential ingredient with Joyce; almost every word in the great monologues in Finnegans Wake is overcharged with allusions and implications. To revert to an earlier metaphor, economy demands that the stepping stones of the narrative should be spaced wide enough apart to require a significant effort from the reader; Joyce makes him feel like a runner in a marathon race with hurdles every other step and aggravated by a mile-long row of hieroglyphs which he must decipher. Joyce would perhaps be the perfect writer-of the perfect reader existed.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

“But it was Poincare who wrote that what guided him in his unconscious gropings towards the 'happy combinations' which yield new discoveries was 'the feeling of mathematical beauty, of the harmony of number, of forms, of geometric elegance. This is a true aesthetic feeling that all mathematicians know.' The greatest among mathematicians and scientists, from Kepler to Einstein, made similar confessions. 'Beauty is the first test; there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics', wrote G.H. Hardy in his classic, A Mathematician's Apology. Jacques Hadamard, whose pioneer work on the psychology of invention I have quoted, drew the final conclusion: "The sense of beauty as a "drive" for discovery in our mathematical field, seems to be almost the only one.' And the laconic pronouncement of Dirac, addressed to his fellow-physicists, bears repeating: 'It is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

“Trace the contours of your face with a soapy finger on the bathroom mirror (it is easily done by closing one eye). There is a shock waiting: the image which looked life-size has shrunk to half-size, like a headhunter's trophy. A person walking away does not seem to become a dwarf -- as he should; a black glove looks just as black in the sunlight as in shadow -- though it should not;”
― Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

“The only way out of this cul-de-sac seems to be to substitute for genetic atomism, which has so drastically broken down, the concept of the genetic micro-hierarchy, with its own built-in rules, that permit a great amount of variation, but only in limited directions on a limited number of themes. This really amounts to the revival of an ancient idea which goes back to Goethe-and even further to Plato. The point is worth a short historical digression-which may make it clear why the concept of homology has such great importance not only for the biologist, but also for the philosopher.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine

“One method of economy is 'leaving out' - firstly, everything that by the writer's standards is irrelevamt, in the second place everything that is obvious, i.e. which the reader can and should supply out of his own imagination. 'The more bloody good stuff you cut out the more bloody good your novel will be,' Hemingway advised a young writer.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

“. Whoever proves right in the end must first be and do wrong. But it is only after the fact that we learn who was right to begin with.”
― Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon