Top 200 Arthur Koestler Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “From the psychological point of view, the self-asserting emotions, derived from emergency reactions, involve a narrowing of consciousness; the participatory emotions an expansion of consciousness by identificatory processes of various kinds.”

— Arthur Koestler

52. “The more backwoodish a social group, juvenile or adult, the stricter its conception of the normal, and the readier it will ridicule any departure from it.”

— Arthur Koestler

53. “If conquerors be regarded as the engine-drivers of History, then the conquerors of thought are perhaps the pointsmen who, less conspicuous to the traveler’s eye, determine the direction of the journey.”

— Arthur Koestler

54. “Space-ships and time machines are no escape from the human condition.”

— Arthur Koestler

55. “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.”

— Arthur Koestler

56. “The thing represented had to pass through two distorting lenses: the artist’s mind, and his medium of expression, before it emerged as a man-made dream – the two, of course, being intimately connected and interacting with each other.”

— Arthur Koestler

57. “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.”

— Arthur Koestler

58. “Among all forms of mentation, verbal thinking is the most articulate, the most complex, and the most vulnerable to infectious diseases. It is liable to absorb whispered suggestions, and to incorporate them as hidden persuaders into the code.”

— Arthur Koestler

59. “There was no certainty; only the appeal to that mocking oracle they called History, who gave her sentence only when the jaws of the appealer had long since fallen to dust.”

— Arthur Koestler

60. “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.”

— Arthur Koestler

61. “The discoveries of yesterday are the truisms of tomorrow, because we can add to our knowledge but cannot subtract from it.”

— Arthur Koestler

62. “We whip the groaning masses of the country towards a theoretical future happiness, which only we can see.”

— Arthur Koestler

63. “The pre-Socratics frequently wrote their treatises in verse; the ancient Peruvian language had a single word-hamavec-for poet and inventor.”

— Arthur Koestler

64. “The old disease, thought Rubashov. Revolutionaries should not think through other people’s minds. Or, perhaps they should? Or even ought to? How can one change the world if one identifies oneself with everybody? How else can one change it? He who understands and forgives – where would he find a motive to act? Where would he not?”

— Arthur Koestler

65. “Numbers are eternal while everything else is perishable; they are of the nature not of matter, but of mind; they permit mental operations of the most surprising and delightful kind without reference to the coarse external world of the senses-which is how the divine mind must be supposed to operate. The ecstatic contemplation of geometrical forms and mathematical laws is therefore the most effective means of purging the soul of earthly passion, and the principle link between man and divinity.”

— Arthur Koestler

66. “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.”

— Arthur Koestler

67. “They dreamed of power with the object of abolishing power; of ruling over the people to wean them from the habit of being ruled.”

— Arthur Koestler

68. “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

69. “Much depends on asking the right question at the right time.”

— Arthur Koestler

70. “Had not history always been an inhumane, unscrupulous builder, mixing its mortar of lies, blood and mud?”

— Arthur Koestler

71. “Aberrations of the human mind are to a large extent due to the obsessional pursuit of some part-truth, treated as if it were a whole truth.”

— Arthur Koestler

72. “The feeling of fraternal warmth towards fellow beings handicapped by their social background became transformed into a self-degrading worship of the primitive, the uncouth, the humorless; of the blockheaded “class-conscious” proletarian – the cult of the lowest common denominator.”

— Arthur Koestler

73. “Let me repeat: the crimes of violence committed for selfish personal motives are historically insignificant compared to those committed ad majoram gloriam Dei, out of a self-sacrificing devotion to a flag, a leader, a religious faith, or a political conviction. Man has always been prepared not only to kill but also to die for good, bad or completely futile causes. And what can be a more valid proof of the reality of the self-transcending urge than this readiness to die for an ideal?”

— Arthur Koestler

74. “We brought you truth, and in our mouth it sounded a lie. We brought you freedom, and it looks in our hands like a whip. We brought you the living life, and where our voice is heard the trees wither and there is a rustling of dry leaves. We brought you the promise of the future, but our tongue stammered and barked...”

— Arthur Koestler

75. “The less consciously we drift with the wind, the more willingly we do it; the more consciously, the less willingly.”

— Arthur Koestler

76. “Creativity in science could be described as the act of putting two and two together to make five.”

— Arthur Koestler

77. “The moment of truth, the sudden emergence of a new insight, is an act of intuition.”

— Arthur Koestler

78. “True creativity often starts where language ends.”

— Arthur Koestler

79. “To sell oneself for thirty pieces of silver is an honest transaction; but to sell oneself to one s own conscience is to abandon mankind.”

— Arthur Koestler

80. “The story of the Khazar Empire, as it slowly emerges from the past, begins to look like the most cruel hoax which history has ever perpetrated.”

— Arthur Koestler

81. “History knows no scruples and no hesitation. Inert and unerring, she flows towards her goal. At every bend in her course she leaves the mud which she carries and the corpses of the drowned.”

— Arthur Koestler

82. “Honor is decency without vanity.”

— Arthur Koestler

83. “The principle that the end justifies the means is and remains the only rule of political ethics; anything else is just a vague chatter and melts away between one’s fingers.”

— Arthur Koestler

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

— Arthur Koestler

85. “Two half-truths do not make a truth, and two half- cultures do not make a culture.”

— Arthur Koestler

86. “Coincidence may be described as the chance encounter of two unrelated causal chains which.”

— Arthur Koestler

87. “Woe unto the defeated, whom history treads into the dust.”

— Arthur Koestler

88. “Every error has its consequences and venges itself unto the seventh generation.”

— Arthur Koestler

89. “Scientists are peeping toms at the keyhole of eternity.”

— Arthur Koestler

90. “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.”

— Arthur Koestler

91. “The prerequisite of originality is the art of forgetting, at the proper moment, what we know.”

— Arthur Koestler

92. “The individual is not a killer, but the group is, and by identifying with it the individual is transformed into a killer.”

— Arthur Koestler

93. “History had a slow pulse; man counted in years, history in generations.”

— Arthur Koestler

94. “Newton’s apple and Cezanne’s apple are discoveries more closely related than they seem.”

— Arthur Koestler

95. “The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.”

— Arthur Koestler

96. “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.”

— Arthur Koestler

97. “The ‘missing link’ between ape and man will probably never be found- because it was an embryo.”

— Arthur Koestler

98. “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

99. “Space-ships and time machines are no escape from the human condition. Let Othello subject Desdemona to a lie-detector test; his jealousy will still blind him to the evidence. Let Oedipus triumph over gravity; he won’t triumph over his fate.”

— Arthur Koestler

100. “Men cannot be treated as units in operations of political arithmetic because they behave like the symbols for zero and the infinite, which dislocate all mathematical operations.”

— Arthur Koestler