Arthur Koestler
Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.Collection: Learning
Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion.Collection: Death
The most persistent sound which reverberates through man's history is the beating of war drums.Collection: War
Courage is never to let your actions be influenced by your fears.Collection: Courage
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.Collection: Politics
Prometheus is reaching out for the stars with an empty grin on his face.
True creativity often starts where language ends.
The principal mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.
The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.
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.
Scientists are peeping toms at the keyhole of eternity.
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.
The prerequisite of originality is the art of forgetting, at the proper moment, what we know.
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.
The definition of the individual was: a multitude of one million divided by one million.
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.Collection: Self
The creative act does not create something out of nothing; it uncovers, selects, reshuffles, combines, synthesizes already existing facts, ideas, faculties, and skills.Collection: Skills
The continuous disasters of man's history are mainly due to his excessive capacity and urge to become identified with a tribe, nation, church or cause, and to espouse its credo uncritically and enthusiastically, even if its tenets are contrary to reason, devoid of self-interest and detrimental to the claims of self-preservation.We are thus driven to the unfashionable conclusion that the trouble with our species is not an excess of aggression, but an excess capacity for fanatical devotion.Collection: Men
The principle mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.Collection: Carpe Diem
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.Collection: Mistake
In any language it is a struggle to make a sentence say exactly what you mean.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Wisdom
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.Collection: Spring
Two half truths do not make a truth.Collection: Two
One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Men
Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.Collection: Inspiring
Modern man lives isolated in his artificial environment, not because the artificial is evil as such, but because of his lack of comprehension of the forces which make it work- of the principles which relate his gadgets to the forces of nature, to the universal order. It is not central heating which makes his existence 'unnatural,' but his refusal to take an interest in the principles behind it. By being entirely dependent on science, yet closing his mind to it, he leads the life of an urban barbarian.Collection: Men
Brain-washing starts in the cradle.Collection: Brain
Honor is decency without vanity.Collection: Vanity
Creativity is the defeat of habit by originality.Collection: Creativity
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.Collection: Stress
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.Collection: War
The ultimate truth is penultimately always a falsehood. He who will be proved right in the end appears to be wrong and harmful before it.Collection: Truth
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.Collection: What Matters
The jester is brother to the sage.Collection: Brother
The purposiveness of all vital processes, the strategy of the genes and the power of the exploratory drive in animal and man, all seem to indicate that the pull of the future is as real as the pressure of the past.Collection: Real
The new frontiers to be conquered are mainly in the convolutions of the cortex.Collection: New Frontiers
In the pun, two strings of thought are tangled into one acoustic knot.Collection: Two
Man's destiny was no longer determined from 'above' by a super-human wisdom and will, but from 'below' by the sub-human agencies of glands, genes, atoms, or waves of probability. ...they could determine his fate, but could provide him with no moral guidance, no values and meaning. A puppet of the Gods is a tragic figure, a puppet suspended on his chromosomes is merely grotesque.Collection: Fate
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.Collection: Pertinent Questions
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.Collection: Book
The moment of truth, the sudden emergence of a new insight, is an act of intuition.Collection: Intuition
Creativity in science could be described as the act of putting two and two together to make fiveCollection: Creativity
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.Collection: Believe
The Régime did not want Communists; it wanted robots. It will take at least a generation to change them back into humans again.Collection: Robots
Our Press and our schools cultivate Chauvinism, militarism, dogmatism, conformism and ignorance. The arbitrary power of the Government is unlimited, and unexampled in history; freedom of the Press, of opinion and of movement are as thoroughly exterminated as though the proclamation of the Rights of Man had never been. We have built up the most gigantic police apparatus, with informers made a national institution, and the most refined scientific system of political and mental torture. We whip the groaning masses of the country towards a theoretical future happiness, which only we can.Collection: Country
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.Collection: Cutting