Top 200 Arthur Koestler Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Arthur Koestler

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2. “Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion.”

— Arthur Koestler

3. “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.”

— Arthur Koestler

4. “One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up.”

— Arthur Koestler

5. “Every creative act involves a new innocence or perception, liberated from the cataract of accepted belief.”

— Arthur Koestler

6. “Two half truths do not make a truth.”

— Arthur Koestler

7. “Creativity is the defeat of habit by originality.”

— Arthur Koestler

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

— Arthur Koestler

9. “The jester is brother to the sage.”

— Arthur Koestler

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

— Arthur Koestler

11. “The creative act does not create something out of nothing; it uncovers, selects, reshuffles, combines, synthesizes already existing facts, ideas, faculties, and skills.”

— Arthur Koestler

12. “If power corrupts, the reverse is also true; persecution corrupts the victims though perhaps in subtler and more tragic ways.”

— Arthur Koestler

13. “The principle mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.”

— Arthur Koestler

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

— Arthur Koestler

15. “The new frontiers to be conquered are mainly in the convolutions of the cortex.”

— Arthur Koestler

16. “Habit is the denial of creativity and the negation of freedom; a self-imposed straitjacket of which the wearer is unaware.”

— Arthur Koestler

17. “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.”

— Arthur Koestler

18. “Show us not the aim without the way. For ends and means on earth are so entangled That changing one, you change the other too; Each different path brings other ends in view.”

— Arthur Koestler

19. “A sadist is a person who is kind to a masochist.”

— Arthur Koestler

20. “If the creator has a purpose in equipping us with a neck, he surely would have meant for us to stick it out.”

— Arthur Koestler

21. “Adolescence is a kind of emotional seasickness. Both are funny, but only in retrospect.”

— Arthur Koestler

22. “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.”

— Arthur Koestler

23. “Aggressiveness is not the main trouble with the human species, but rather an excess capacity for fanatical devotion.”

— Arthur Koestler

24. “Snobbery is not merely a silly human weakness but something basic in the mentality of modern man-a symptom which reflects the general sickness, the dislocation of social and cultural values in contemporary civilization.”

— Arthur Koestler

25. “To want to meet an author because you like his books is as ridiculous as wanting to meet the goose because you like pate de foie gras.”

— Arthur Koestler

26. “History is a priori amoral; it has no conscience.”

— Arthur Koestler

27. “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.”

— Arthur Koestler

28. “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.”

— Arthur Koestler

29. “Most of us were not afraid of death, only of the act of dying; and there were times when we overcame even this fear. At such moments we were free-men without shadows, dismissed from the ranks of the mortal; it was the most complete experience of freedom that can be granted a man.”

— Arthur Koestler

30. “A publisher who writes is like a cow in a milk bar.”

— Arthur Koestler

31. “What is an editor but a cross between a fall guy and a father figure? arthur koestler.”

— Arthur Koestler

32. “I am not sure whether ethical absolutes exist. But I am sure that we have to act as if they existed or civilization perishes.”

— Arthur Koestler

33. “Innovation is a twofold threat to academic mediocrities: it endangers their oracular authority, and it evokes the deeper fear that their whole, laboriously constructed intellectual edifice might collapse.”

— Arthur Koestler

34. “Every jump of technical progress leaves the relative intellectual development of the masses a step behind, and thus causes a fall in the political-maturity thermometer. It takes sometimes tens of years, sometimes generations, for a people’s level of understanding gradually to adapt itself to the changed state of affairs, until it has recovered the same capacity for self-government as it had already possessed at a lower stage of civilization.”

— Arthur Koestler

35. “The most persistent sound which reverberates through man’s history is the beating of war drums.”

— Arthur Koestler

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36. “When reality becomes unbearable, the mind must withdraw from it and create a world of artificial perfection. Plato’s world of pure Ideas and Forms, which alone is to be considered as real, whereas the world of nature which we perceive is merely its cheap Woolworth copy, is a flight into delusion.”

— Arthur Koestler

37. “The fact is: I no longer believe in my own infallibility. That is why I am lost.”

— Arthur Koestler

38. “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.”

— Arthur Koestler

39. “Laughter and weeping, the Greek masks of comedy and tragedy, mark the extremes of a continuous spectrum; both provide channels for the overflow of emotion; both are.”

— Arthur Koestler

40. “Prometheus is reaching out for the stars with an empty grin on his face.”

— Arthur Koestler

41. “Einstein’s space is no closer to reality than Van Gogh’s sky.”

— Arthur Koestler

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

— Arthur Koestler

43. “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.”

— Arthur Koestler

44. “War is a ritual, a deadly ritual, not the result of aggressive self-assertion, but of self-transcending identification. Without loyalty to tribe, church, flag or ideal, there would be no wars.”

— Arthur Koestler

45. “Brain-washing starts in the cradle.”

— Arthur Koestler

46. “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 forms of contact, or simply by breathing the common air.”

— Arthur Koestler

47. “The integrative tendencies of the individual are incomparably more dangerous than his self-assertive tendencies.”

— Arthur Koestler

48. “The ‘gallows’ are not only a symbol of death, but also a symbol of cruelty, terror and irreverence for life; the common denominator of primitive savagery, medieval fanaticism and modern totalitarianism.”

— Arthur Koestler

49. “One question that people always ask at home is never asked here: “What happened to Communism in Russia?” Everybody yawns when a visitor brings it up, because the answer is so obvious to every Russian. The answer is that there never was Communism in Russia; there were only communists.”

— Arthur Koestler

50. “The ultimate truth is penultimately a falsehood.”

— Arthur Koestler