Top 200 Arthur Koestler Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Chemically induced hallucinations, delusions and raptures may be frightening or wonderfully gratifying; in either case they are in the nature of confidence tricks played on one’s own nervous system.”

— Arthur Koestler

102. “Hitherto man had to live with the idea of death as an individual; from now onward mankind will have to live with the idea of its death as a species.”

— Arthur Koestler

103. “There is only one prospect worse than being chained to an intolerable existence: The nightmare of a botched attempt to end it.”

— Arthur Koestler

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

— Arthur Koestler

105. “Conscious and unconscious experiences do not belong to different compartments of the mind; they form a continuous scale of gradations, of degrees of awareness.”

— Arthur Koestler

106. “Faith is a wondrous thing; it is not only capable of moving mountains, but also of making you believe that a herring is a race horse.”

— Arthur Koestler

107. “We cannot unthink unless we are insane.”

— Arthur Koestler

108. “God is dethroned; and although the incognizant masses are tardy in realizing the event, they feel the icy draught caused by that vacancy. Man enters upon a spiritual ice age; the established churches can no longer provide more than Eskimo huts where their shivering flock huddles together.”

— Arthur Koestler

109. “In any language it is a struggle to make a sentence say exactly what you mean.”

— Arthur Koestler

110. “The temptations of God were always more dangerous for mankind than those of Satan.”

— Arthur Koestler

111. “If Nature abhors the void, the mind abhors what is meaningless. Show a person an ink-blot, and he will start at once to organise it into a hierarchy of shapes, tentacles, wheels, masks, a dance of figures.”

— Arthur Koestler

112. “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.”

— Arthur Koestler

113. “Art, like religion, is a school of self-transcendence; it expands individual awareness into cosmic awareness, as science teaches us to reduce any particular puzzle to the great universal puzzle.”

— Arthur Koestler

114. “Death tripped down the corridor, changing step, struck out here and there, danced pirouettes; often I felt his breath on my face when he was miles away; often I fell asleep and dreamed while he stood leaning over my bed.”

— Arthur Koestler

115. “No writer or teacher or artist can escape the responsibility of influencing others whether he intends to or not, whether he is conscious of it or not.”

— Arthur Koestler

116. “The roads that lead man to knowledge are as wondrous as that knowledge itself.”

— Arthur Koestler

117. “History has taught us that often lies serve her better than the truth; for man is sluggish and has to be led through the desert for forty years before each step in his development. And he has to be driven through the desert with threats and promises, by imaginary terrors and imaginary consolations, so that he should not sit down prematurely to rest and divert himself by worshipping golden calves.”

— Arthur Koestler

118. “Insight depends on the multi-dimensional analysis of the input in its various aspects, on extracting relevant messages from irrelevant noise, identifying patterns in the mosaic until it has become saturated, as it were, with meaning.”

— Arthur Koestler

119. “Each wrong idea we follow is a crime committed against future generations.”

— Arthur Koestler

120. “The philosophy of nature evolved by occasional leaps and bounds alternating with delusional pursuits, culs-de-sac, regressions, periods of blindness, and amnesia. The great discoveries which determined its course were sometimes the unexpected by-products of a chase after quite different hares. At other times, the process of discovery consisted merely in the cleaning away of the rubbish that blocked the path, or in the rearranging of existing items of knowledge in a different pattern.”

— Arthur Koestler

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

— Arthur Koestler

122. “El valor consiste en no permitir que tus temores influyan sobre tus actos.”

— Arthur Koestler

123. “This was written before the full extent of the holocaust was known, but that does not alter the fact that the large majority of surviving Jews in the world is of Eastern European –.”

— Arthur Koestler

124. “There is a strangely consistent parallel between Copernicus’ character, and the humble, devious manner in which the Copernican revolution entered through the back door of history, preceded by the apologetic remark: ‘Please don’t take seriously – it is all meant in fun, for mathematicians only, and highly improbable indeed.”

— Arthur Koestler

125. “The deterioration of the intelligentsia is as much a symptom of disease as the corruption of the ruling class or the sleeping sickness of the proletariat.”

— Arthur Koestler

126. “I have coined the term ‘bisociation’ in order to make a distinction between the routine skills of thinking on a single ‘plane’, as it were, and the creative act, which, as I shall try to show, always operates on more than one plane. The former may be called single-minded, the latter a double-minded, transitory state of unstable equilibrium where the balance of both emotion and thought is disturbed.”

— Arthur Koestler

127. “Solitary confinement is rock bottom, it’s absolute unfreedom.”

— Arthur Koestler

128. “Comic discovery is paradox stated-scientific discovery is paradox resolved.”

— Arthur Koestler

129. “Hierarchies are ‘dissectible’ into their constituent branches, on which the holons form the ‘nodes’. The number of levels which a hierarchy comprises is called its ‘depth’, and the number of holons on any given level its ‘span’.”

— Arthur Koestler

130. “Freedom of the will is a metaphysical question outside the scope of this book; but considered as a subjective datum of experience, ‘free will’ is the awareness of alternative choices.”

— Arthur Koestler

131. “Newcomers from Paris transmitted to us Goebbels’ ironic congratulations on our cordial reception in the Land of Freedom. Voelkischer Beobachter, the official Nazi organ, published a list of anti-Nazi authors interned in France, asking them whether they still clung to the blessings of democracy. It was cheap irony, but it cut to the quick; it hurt and stung and burnt.”

— Arthur Koestler

132. “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; and loyalty is a noble thing. I do not mean, of course, that loyalty must necessarily be expressed in group violence-merely that it is a precondition of it; that self-transcending devotion, all through history, has acted as a catalyst for secondary aggression.”

— Arthur Koestler

133. “And yet, by three incorrect steps and their even more correct defence, Kepler stumbled on the correct law. It is perhaps the most amazing sleep-walking performance in the history of science-except for the manner in which he found his First Law, to which we now turn.”

— Arthur Koestler

134. “Whatever the nature of organizing relations may be,′ J. Needham wrote in 1932, ’they form the central problem of biology, and biology will be fruitful in the future only if this is recognized. The hierarchy of relations, from the molecular structure of carbon compounds to the equilibrium of species and ecological wholes, will perhaps be the leading idea of the future.”

— Arthur Koestler

135. “Should we sit with idle hands because the consequences of an act are never quite to be foreseen, and hence all action is evil?”

— Arthur Koestler

136. “Die in silence.”

— Arthur Koestler

137. “All decisive advances in the history of scientific thought can be described in terms of mental cross-fertilization between different disciplines.”

— Arthur Koestler

138. “Saints and mystics spend their lives trying to escape the prison of the flesh;.”

— Arthur Koestler

139. “On successively higher levels of the hierarchy we find more complex, flexible and less predictable patterns of activity, while on successively lower levels we find more and more mechanised, stereotyped and predictable patterns. In the language of the physicist, a holon on a higher level of the hierarchy has more degrees of freedom than a holon on a lower level.”

— Arthur Koestler

140. “The humorist thrives on deformity; the artist deforms the world to recreate it in his own image.”

— Arthur Koestler

141. “Complexity of thought is no measure of originality.”

— Arthur Koestler

142. “He found out that those processes wrongly known as “monologues” are really dialogues of a special kind; dialogues in which one partner remains silent while the other against all grammatical rules, addresses him as “I” instead of “you”, in order to creep into his confidence and to fathom his intentions; but the silent partner just remains silent, shuns observation and even refuses to be localized in time and space.”

— Arthur Koestler

143. “The Copernican system was not a truly heliocentric one; it was a vacuo-centric system, so to speak.”

— Arthur Koestler

144. “The conditions for original thinking are when two or more streams of research begin to offer evidence that they may converge and so in some manner be combined. It is the combination which can generate new directions of research, and through these it may be found that basic units and activities may have properties not before suspected which open up a lot of new questions for experimental study.”

— Arthur Koestler

145. “An emotionally maladjusted species, we have the uncanny power of turning every blessing, including language, into a curse.”

— Arthur Koestler

146. “To this day, in spite of great efforts, Lamarckism has failed to produce conclusive evidence to prove that acquired characters are transmitted to the offspring; and it seems fairly certain that, while experience does affect heredity, it does not do so in this simple and direct way.”

— Arthur Koestler

147. “Truth is what is useful to humanity, falsehood what is harmful.”

— Arthur Koestler

148. “Since we cannot in the foreseeable future expect the necessary change in human nature to arise by way of a spontaneous mutation, that is, by natural means, we must induce it by artificial means. We can only hope to survive as a species by developing techniques which supplant biological evolution. We must search for a cure for the schizophysiology inherent in man’s nature, and the resulting split in our minds, which led to the situation in which we find ourselves.”

— Arthur Koestler

149. “I am trying to stress a point which they do not sufficiently emphasize, or tend to overlook altogether-namely, that the organism is not a mosaic aggregate of elementary physico-chemical processes, but a hierarchy in which each member, from the sub-cellular level upward, is a closely integrated structure, equipped with self-regulatory devices, and enjoys an advanced form of self-government.”

— Arthur Koestler

150. “The same make of organelles functions in the cells of mice and men; the same make of contractile protein serves the motion of amoeba and of the pianist’s fingers; the same four chemical units constitute the alphabet of heredity throughout the animal and plant kingdoms-only the words are different for every creature.”

— Arthur Koestler