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The definition of the individual was: a multitude of one million divided by one million.
Arthur Koestler
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Arthur Koestler
Age: 77 †
Born: 1905
Born: September 5
Died: 1983
Died: March 1
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Buda Pest
Kösztler Artúr
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More quotes by Arthur Koestler
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
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.
Arthur Koestler
You can't help people being right for the wrong reasons...This fear of finding oneself in bad company is not an expression of political purity it is an expression of a lack of self-confidence.
Arthur Koestler
Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.
Arthur Koestler
The real achievement in discoveries... is seeing an analogy where no one saw one before... The essence of discovery is that unlikely marriage of cabbages and kings — of previously unrelated frames of reference or universes of discourse — whose union will solve the previously insoluble problem.
Arthur Koestler
Honor is decency without vanity.
Arthur Koestler
...the crimes of violence committed for selfish, personal motives are historically insignificant compared to those committed ad majorem gloriam Dei, out of a self-sacrificing devotion to the flag, a leader, a religeous faith or political conviction.
Arthur Koestler
When all is said, its atmosphere [England's] still contains fewer germs of aggression and brutality per cubic foot in a crowded bus, pub or queue than in any other country in which I have lived
Arthur Koestler
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 universe filled with a uniformly distributed gas.
Arthur Koestler
Einstein's space is no closer to reality than Van Gogh's sky.
Arthur Koestler
Newton's apple and Cezanne's apple are discoveries more closely related than they seem.
Arthur Koestler
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
The temptations of God were always more dangerous for mankind than those of Satan.
Arthur Koestler
Every creative act – in science, art, or religion – involves a regression to a more primitive level, a new innocence of perception liberated from the cataract of accepted beliefs.
Arthur Koestler
History had a slow pulse man counted in years, history in generations
Arthur Koestler
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
The inner defenses are unconscious. They consist of a kind of magic aura which the mind builds around cherished belief. Arguments which penetrate into the magic aura are not dealt with rationally but by a specific type of pseudo-reasoning. Absurdities and contradictions are made acceptable by specious rationalizations.
Arthur Koestler
One may not regard the world as a sort of metaphysical brothel for emotions.
Arthur Koestler
The individual is not a killer, but the group is, and by identifying with it the individual is transformed into a killer.
Arthur Koestler
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