Quotes from Arthur Koestler

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.

Helen Spurway concluded from the evidence of homology that the organism has only 'a restricted mutation spectrum' which 'determines its possibilities of evolution'.

The cause of the party's defectiveness must be found. All our principles were right, but our results were wrong. This is a diseased century. We diagnosed the disease… but wherever we applied the healing knife a new sore appeared. Our will was hard and pure, we should have been loved by the people. But they hate us. Why are we so odious and detested?

The memoir did in fact get him a professorship at the Lycee in Lyon. It was called Considerations of the Mathematical Theory of Games of Chance, and demonstrated, among other things, the habitual gamblers are, in the long run, bound to lose.

By feeding back information on the lie of the land to the gene-complex, the cytoplasm thus co-determines which genes should be active and which should be temporarily or permanently switched off.

The history of cosmic theories, in particular, may without exaggeration be called a history of collective obsessions and controlled schizophrenias; and the manner in which some of the most important individual discoveries were arrived at reminds one more of a sleepwalker's performance than an electronic's brain.

The eight sin, deadlier than all- self transcendence through misplaced devotion-is not included in the list.

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.

The problem of the planetary orbits had been hopelessly bogged down in its purely geometrical frame of reference, and when Kepler realized that he could not get it unstuck, he tore it out of that frame and removed it into the field of physics. This operation of removing a problem from its traditional context and placing it into a new one, looking at it through glasses of of a different colour as it were, has always seemed to me of the very essence of the creative process.

A faith is not acquired by reasoning. One does not fall in love with a woman, or enter the womb of a church, as a result of logical persuasion. Reason may defend an act of faith-but only after the act has been committed, and the man com­mitted to the act.

Theoretical physics is no longer concerned with things, but with the mathematical relations between abstractions which are the residue of the vanished things.

Saints and mystics spend their lives trying to escape the prison of the flesh;

Progress in the apparently most rational of human pursuits was achieved in a highly irrational manner, epitomized by Gauss' 'I have had my solutions for a long time, but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them'. The mind, owing to its hierarchic organization, functions on several levels at once, and often one level does not know what the other is doing; the essence of the creative act is bringing them together.

The limitations of our biological equipment may condemn us to the role of Peeping Toms at the keyhole of eternity. But at least let us take the stuffing out of the keyhole, which blocks even our limited view.

The decisive turning points in the history of every art-form are discoveries which show the characteristic features already discussed: they uncover what has always been there; they are 'revolutionary', that is, destructive and constructive; they compel us to revalue our values and impose a new set of rules on the eternal game.

What made Newton's postulate nevertheless a modern Law of Nature, was his mathematical formulation of the mysterious entity to which it referred. And that formulation Newton deduced from the discoveries of Kepler - who had intuitively glimpsed gravity, and shied away from it. In such crooked ways does the tree of science grow.

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.

This 'ruthless' determination of morphogenetic fields to assert their individuality reflects, in our terminology, the self-assertive principle in development.

In a hundred years we will be able to appeal to the criminal's reason and social instincts. To-day we have still to work on his physical constitution, and crash him, physically and mentally, if necessary

What was decency? A certain form of convention, still bound by the traditions and rules of the knightly jousts. The new conception of honour should be formulated differently: to serve without vanity and unto the last consequence. ...

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. . . .

but since every created being is ultimately an emanation of God, partaking of His Essence in a measure diminishing with distance, the soul will always strive upward, to its source.

there are no frontiers where the realm of science ends and that of art begins, and the uomo universale of the Renaissance was a citizen of both.

He who becomes dizzy is lost.