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Top 200 Arthur Koestler Quotes (2024 Update)
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Arthur Koestler Quote: “Consciousness in this view is an emergent quality, which evolves into more complex and structured states in phylogeny, as the ultimate manifestation of the Integrative Tendency towards the creation of order out of disorder, of ‘information’ out of ‘noise’.”
Arthur Koestler Quote: “There is, for example, the hoary problem why the skin on the soles of our feet is so much thicker than elsewhere. If the thickening occurred after birth as a result of stress, wear and tear, there would be no problem. But the skin of the sole is already thickened in the embryo which has never walked, bare-foot or otherwise.”
Arthur Koestler Quote: “Why, if evolution were a free for all, restrained only by selection for fitness, why did Australia not produce some of the bug-eyed monsters of science fiction? The only moderately unorthodox creation of that isolated island in a hundred million years are the kangaroos and wallabies; the rest of its fauna consists of rather poor replicas of more efficient placental types-vatiations on a limited number of archetypal themes.”
Arthur Koestler Quote: “Illusion, then, is the simultaneous presence and interaction in the mind of two universes, one real, one imaginary. It transports the spectator from the trivial present to a plane remote from self-interest and makes him forget his own preoccupations and anxieties; in other words, it facilitates the unfolding of his participatory emotions, and inhibits or neutralizes his self-asserting tendencies.”
Arthur Koestler Quote: “Complexity of thought is no measure of originality.”
Arthur Koestler Quote: “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 Quote: “Theoretical physics is no longer concerned with things, but with the mathematical relations between abstractions which are the residue of the vanished things.”
Arthur Koestler Quote: “To quote Dr. Ewer: ‘Behaviour will tend to be always a jump ahead of structure and so play a decisive role in the evolutionary process.’ In this light, evolution no longer appears as a tale told by an idiot, but rather as an epic recited by a stutterer-at times haltingly and painfully, then precipitating in bursts.”
Arthur Koestler Quote: “The popular image of the Magician has certain features in common with that of the Artist: both are unselfishly devoted to lofty tasks-which frequently overlapped in the uomo universale of the Renaissance.”
Arthur Koestler Quote: “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.”
Arthur Koestler Quote: “The curse of ‘spherism’ upon man’s vision of the universe lasted for two thousand years.”
Arthur Koestler Quote: “Good things can be created from bad.”
Arthur Koestler Quote: “The pressure of the environment cramps art as it cramps behaviour. One may challenge this environment, but one has to pay for it, and the price is neurotic guilt. There never was an intelligentsia without a guilt complex; it is the income tax one has to pay for wanting to make others richer.”
Arthur Koestler Quote: “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.”
Arthur Koestler Quote: “Emphasis and implication are complementary techniques. The first bullies the audience into acceptance; the second entices it into mental collaboration; the first forces the offer down the consumer’s throat; the second tantalizes, to whet his appetite.”
Arthur Koestler Quote: “The working of the central nervous system is a hierarchic affair in which functions at the higher levels do not deal directly with the ultimate structural units, such as neurons or motor units, but operate by activating lower patterns that have their own relatively autonomous structural unity.”
Arthur Koestler Quote: “The distance between the library and the bedroom is astronomical.”
Arthur Koestler Quote: “We are indeed a blind race,′ wrote a contemporary scientist, ’and the next generation, blind to its own blindness, will be amazed at ours.”
Arthur Koestler Quote: “I have no illusions about the prospects of the theory I am proposing: it will suffer the inevitable fate of being proven wrong in many, or most, details, by new advances in psychology and neurology. What I am hoping for is that it will be found to contain a shadowy pattern of truth, and that it may stimulate those who search for unity in the diverse manifestations of human thought and emotion.”
Arthur Koestler Quote: “Thus the pure archetypal harmonies, and their echoes, the musical consonances, are generated by dividing the circle by means of construable, regular polygons; wheras the ‘unspeakable’ polygons produce discordant sounds, and are useless in the scheme of the universe.”
Arthur Koestler Quote: “From the Pythagoreans onward, through the Renaissance to our times, the oceanic feeling, the sense of participation in the mystery of the infinite, was the principle inspiration of that winged and flat-footed creature, the scientist.”
Arthur Koestler Quote: “Thus experience, both of the exalted and trivial kind, indicates that the mind is particularly receptive to and suggestible by messages which arrive in a rhythmic pattern, or accompanied by a rhythmic pattern.”
Arthur Koestler Quote: “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.”
Arthur Koestler Quote: “The history of science abounds with examples of discoveries greeted with howls of laughter because they seemed to be a marriage of incompatibles-until the marriage bore fruit and the alleged incompatibility of the partners turned out to derive from prejudice. The humorist, on the other hand, deliberately chooses discordant codes of behaviour or universes of discourse to expose their hidden incongruities in the resulting clash. Com.”
Arthur Koestler Quote: “Specialization, in morphogenesis as in other fields, exacts its price in creativity.”
Arthur Koestler Quote: “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.”
Arthur Koestler Quote: “Dreaming could be described as a de-differentiation of reasoning-matrices and even, up to a point, of personal identity.”
Arthur Koestler Quote: “The creative act of the humorist consisted in bringing about a momentary fusion between two habitually incompatible matrices. Scientific discovery, as we shall presently see, can be described in very similar terms-as the permanent fusion of matrices of thought previously believed to be incompatible.”
Arthur Koestler Quote: “Wherever we find orderly, stable systems in Nature, we find that they are hierarchically structured, for the simple reason that without such structuring of complex systems into sub-assemblies, there could be no order and stability-except the order of a dead universr filled with a uniformly distributed gas.”
Arthur Koestler Quote: “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.”
Arthur Koestler Quote: “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.”
Arthur Koestler Quote: “But the revival of a dynamic psychology which reinstated the academic respectability of such terms as curiosity, exploratory drive, purpose, only came about when experimental evidence showed that even in the rat the urge to explore may prevail over hunger and fear.”
Arthur Koestler Quote: “At each step biochemical triggers and feedbacks determine which of the alternative developmental pathways among several possibles a group of cells will actually follow.”
Arthur Koestler Quote: “The habits and learning potentialities of all species are fixed within the narrow limits which the structure of its nervous system and organs permits; those of homo sapiens seem unlimited precisely because the possible uses of the evolutionary novelty in his skull were quite out of proportion with the demands of his natural environment.”
Arthur Koestler Quote: “The moment attention is focused on a normally automatized part-function such as ennunciating consonants, the matrix breaks down, the needle gets stuck, and the performance is paralyzed-like the centipede who was asked in which order he moved his hundred legs, and could walk no more.”
Arthur Koestler Quote: “Every good joke contains an element of the riddle-it may be childishly simple, or subtle and challenging-which the listener must solve. By doing so, he is lifted out of his passive role and compelled to co-operate, to repeat to some extent the process of inventing the joke, to re-create it in his imagination. The type of entertainment dished out by the mass media makes one apt to forget that true recreation is re-creation.”
Arthur Koestler Quote: “Helen Spurway concluded from the evidence of homology that the organism has only ‘a restricted mutation spectrum’ which ‘determines its possibilities of evolution’.”
Arthur Koestler Quote: “Coghill has shown that the motor patterns of the animal develop prior to the development of sensory innervation.”
Arthur Koestler Quote: “But where is the jury who decides whether devotion is of the ‘right’ or the ‘misguided’ kind?”
Arthur Koestler Quote: “This ‘ruthless’ determination of morphogenetic fields to assert their individuality reflects, in our terminology, the self-assertive principle in development.”
Arthur Koestler Quote: “Thus one should not underestimate ripeness as a factor facilitating discoveries which, as the saying goes, are ‘in the air’-meaning, that the various components which will go into the new synthesis are all lying around and only waiting for the trigger-action of chance, or the catalysing action of an exceptional brain, to be assembled and welded together. If one opportunity is missed, another will occur.”
Arthur Koestler Quote: “Laughter is a luxury reflex which could arise only in a creature whose reason has gained a degree of autonomy from the urges of emotion, and enables him to perceive his own emotions as redundant-to realize that he has been fooled.”
Arthur Koestler Quote: “The crimes of a caligula shrink to insignificance compared to the havoc wrought by Torquemada.”
Arthur Koestler Quote: “The metre of the poet, the metronome of the musician, the centimetre of the mathematician, are all derived from the same root, metron: measure, measurement.”
Arthur Koestler Quote: “The superimposition of two systems: thought and metre,′ wrote Proust, ’is a primary element of ordered complexity, that is to say, of beauty.”
Arthur Koestler Quote: “In other words, evolution is neither a free-for-all, nor the execution of a rigidly predetermined computer programme. It could be compared to a musical composition whose possibilities are limited by the rules of harmony and the structure of the diatonic scales-which, however, permit an inexhaustible number of original creations. Or it could be compared to the game of chess obeying fixed rules but with equally inexhaustible variations.”
Arthur Koestler Quote: “Could some similar paradox be responsible for the crisis in modern physics – some unconscious blockage which prevents us from seeing the ‘obvious’, and compels us to persist in our own version of wavemechanical double-think?”
Arthur Koestler Quote: “For Pythagoras as for Kepler, the two kinds of contemplation were twins; for them philosophy and religion were motivated by the same longing : to catch glimpses of eternity through the window of time.”
Arthur Koestler Quote: “The integrative powers of life are manifested in the phenomena of symbiosis between organelles, in the varied forms of partnership within the same species or between different species; in the phenomena of regeneration, in lower species, of complete individuals from their fragments; in the re-formation of scrambled embryonic organs, etc. The self-assertive tendency is equally ubiquitous in the competitive struggle for life.”
Arthur Koestler Quote: “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.”
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