Quotes from Arthur Koestler

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

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

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

We cannot unthink unless we are insane.

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.

Creative synthesis has a basic, bisociative pattern : the sudden interlocking of two previously unrelated skills or matrices of thought.

The Yogi and the Commissar

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

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

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

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

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

Woe unto the defeated, whom history treads into the dust.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion.

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

History had a slow pulse; man counted in years, history in generations

Creativity is the defeat of habit by originality.