The Act of Creation Quotes

“Language can become a screen which stands between the thinker and reality. This is the reason why true creativity often starts where language ends.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

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

“The sex-drive in the Freudian system is essentially something to be disposed of -through the proper channels or by sublimation; pleasure is derived not from its pursuit, but from getting rid of it.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

“The metre of the poet, the metronome of the musician, the centimetre of the mathematician, are all derived from the same root, metron: measure, measurement.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

“The creative act is not an act of creation in the sense of the Old Testament. It does not create something out of noting; it uncovers, selects, re-shuffles, combines, synthesizes already existing facts, ideas, faculties, skills. The more familiar the parts, the more striking the new whole. Man's knowledge of the changes of the tides and the phases of the moon is as old as his observation that apples fall to earth in the ripeness of time. Yet the combination of these and other equally familiar data in Newton's theory of gravity changed mankind's outlook on the world.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

“Whatever the nature of organizing relations may be,' J. Needham wrote in 1932, 'they form the central problem of biology, and biology will be fruitful in the future only if this is recognized. The hierarchy of relations, from the molecular structure of carbon compounds to the equilibrium of species and ecological wholes, will perhaps be the leading idea of the future.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

“The growth of the nervous system from beginning to end is dominated by 'a totally integrated matrix, and not a progressive integration of primarily individuated units'. The organism is not a sum of its reflexes, but on the contrary 'the mechanism of the total pattern is an essential component of the performance of the part, i.e. the reflex'. The stimulus-response scheme cannot explain even embryonic behaviour, because movements appear long before the motor neurons of the reflex arc are connected with the sensory neurons. This centrifugal mode of development means that the individual acts on its environment before it reacts to its environment.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

“For man is a symbol-making animal. He constructs a symbolic model of outer reality in his brain, and expresses it by a second set of symbols in terms of words, equations, pigment, or stone. All he knows directly are bodily sensations, and all he can directly do is to perform bodily motions; the rest of his knowledge and means of expression is symbolical. To use a phrase coined by J. Cohen, man has a metaphorical consciousness. Any attempt to get a direct grasp at naked reality is self-defeating; Urania, too, like the other muses, always has a last veil left to fold in.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

“Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

“The history of science abounds with examples of discoveries greeted with howls of laughter because they seemed to be a marriage of incompatibles-until the marriage bore fruit and the alleged incompatibility of the partners turned out to derive from prejudice. The humorist, on the other hand, deliberately chooses discordant codes of behaviour or universes of discourse to expose their hidden incongruities in the resulting clash. Com”
― Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

“Emphasis and implication are complementary techniques. The first bullies the audience into acceptance; the second entices it into mental collaboration; the first forces the offer down the consumer's throat; the second tantalizes, to whet his appetite.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

“The comic effect of the satire is derived from the simultaneous presence, in the reader's mind, of the social reality with which he is familiar, and of its reflections in the distorting mirror of the satirist. It focuses attention on abuses and deformities in society of which, blunted by habit, we were no longer aware; it makes us suddenly discover the absurdity of the familiar and the familiarity of the absurd.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

“The moment of truth, the sudden emergence of a new insight, is an act of intuition. Such intuitions give the appearance of miraculous flashes, 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 dive vanishes at one end of the chain and comes up at the other end, guided by invisible links.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (Arkana) Paperback – June 5, 1990

“The earliest discovery of Pasteur, and for him the most exciting in all his life, was the asymmetry of molecules as a specific characteristic of living organisms-in other words, the fact that the molecules of living matter come in two varieties which, though chemically identical, are in their spatial structure like mirror images to each other-or like right and left gloves. 'Left-handed' molecules rotate polarized light to the left, 'right-handed' molecules to the right; life substances are thus 'optically active'. Why this should be so we still do not quite know; but it remains a challenging fact that 'no other chemical characteristic is as distinctive of living organisms as is optical activity'.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

“Complexity of thought is no measure of originality.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

“Coghill has shown that the motor patterns of the animal develop prior to the development of sensory innervation.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

“Let me repeat: the principle mark of genius is not perfection, but originality, the opening of new frontiers; once this is done, the conquered territory becomes common property.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

“There is only a limited number of plots, recurring down the ages, derived from an even more limited number of basic patterns-the conflicts, paradoxes, and predicaments inherent in man's condition. And if we continue the stripping game, we find that all these paradoxes and predicaments arose from conflicts between incompatible frames of experience or scales of value, illuminated in consciousness by the bisociative act. In this final illumination Aristotle saw 'the highest form of learning' because it shows us that we are 'men, not gods'; and he called tragedy 'the noblest form of literature' because it purges suffering from its pettiness by showing that its causes lie in the inescapable predicaments of existence.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

“Art, like religion, is a school of self-transcendence; it expands individual awareness into cosmic awareness, as science teaches us to reduce any particular puzzle to the great universal puzzle.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

“Comic discovery is paradox stated-scientific discovery is paradox resolved.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

“The satirist's most effective weapon is irony. Its aim is to defeat the opponent on his own ground by pretending to accept his premises, his values, his methods of reasoning, in order to expose their implicit absurdity. 'All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.' Irony purports to take seriously what it does not; it enters into the spirit of the other person's game to demonstrate that its rules are stupid or vicious. It is a subtle weapon, because the person who wields it must have the imaginative power of seeing through the eyes of his opponent, of projecting himself into the other's mental world.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

“I have coined the term 'bisociation' in order to make a distinction between the routine skills of thinking on a single 'plane', as it were, and the creative act, which, as I shall try to show, always operates on more than one plane. The former may be called single-minded, the latter a double-minded, transitory state of unstable equilibrium where the balance of both emotion and thought is disturbed.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

“When he reads Kierkegaard, he is not moved by what he reads, he is moved by himself reading Kierkegaard–but he is blissfully unaware of it.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

“At the level of ego-psychology', wrote Mowrer in his survey on 'Motivation' in the Annual Review for 1952, 'there may be said to be only one master motive: anxiety.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

“Dreaming could be described as a de-differentiation of reasoning-matrices and even, up to a point, of personal identity.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

“I have shown experimentally that any group of bulbar or spinal nerve cells taken from vertebrates, if deprived of their structural bonds of restraining influences and allowed to undergo a certain degree of degradation, will display permanent automatic, rhythmic, synchronized activity of remarkable regularity. Rhythmic activity, therefore, seems a basic property of pools of nervous elements.
....The rhythm is not something generated through an input rhythm, but is itself a primary rhythm which may be released and even speeded up or retarded by the input, but is not derived from the input. So we have experimental evidence that rhythmic automatism, autonomy of pattern, and hierarchical organization are primary attributes of even the simplest nervous systems, and I think that this unifies our ciew of the nervous system.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

“The working of the central nervous system is a hierarchic affair in which functions at the higher levels do not deal directly with the ultimate structural units, such as neurons or motor units, but operate by activating lower patterns that have their own relatively autonomous structural unity.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

“To sum up: at various stages of embryonic development, and at various structural levels, we find different biochemical mechanisms, but analogue principles at work. At every stage and level the game is played according to fixed rules but with flexible strategies (although their flexibility is normally hidden from the eye and revealed only by the transplantation and grafting techniques of experimental embryology). The overall rules of the game are laid down in the complete set of instructions operative at any level at any time is triggered off by messages from the inter- and extra-cellular environment, which vary in character according to structural level and developmental stage: fertilizing agents, cytoplasmic feedbacks, direct-contact evocators, hormones, and other catalysts.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

“The differentiation of organ systems, organ parts, etc, is a stepwise affair which has been compared to the way a sculptor carves a statue out of a block of wood. With each step in the development the functions assigned to each group of cells become more precise, and more of its genetic potential is suppressed-until in the end most cells lose even their basic freedom to divide. By the time the fertilized ovum has developed into an adult organism, the individual cell has been reduced from totipotentiality to almost nullipotentiality. It still carries the coded blue-print of the whole organism in its chromosomes, but all, except that tiny fraction of the code which regulates its specialized activities, has been permanently switched off.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

“We have seen how laughter is sparked off by the collision of matrices; discovery, by their integration; aesthetic experience by their juxtaposition. Snobbery follows neither of these patterns; it is a hotchpotch of matrices, the application of the rules of one game to another game. It uses a clock to measure weight, and a thermometer to to measure distance. The creative mind perceives things in a new light, the snob in a borrowed light; his pursuits are sterile, and his satisfactions of a vicarious nature. He does not aim at power; he merely wants to rub shoulders with those who wield power, and bask in their reflected glory. He would rather be a tolerated hanger-on of an envied set than a popular member of one to which by nature he belongs. What he admires in public would bore him when alone, but he is unaware of it. When he reads Kirkegaard, he is not moved by what he reads, he is moved by himself reading Kirkegaard-but he is blissfully unaware of it. His emotions do not derive from the object, but from extraneous sources associated with it; his satisfactions are pseudo-satisfactions, his triumphs self-delusions. He has never travelled in the belly of the whale; he has opted for the comforts of sterility against the pangs of creativity.”
― Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation