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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

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Arthur Koestler
Age: 77 †
Born: 1905
Born: September 5
Died: 1983
Died: March 1
Author
Autobiographer
Journalist
Novelist
Philosopher
Screenwriter
Writer
Buda Pest
Kösztler Artúr
Creative
Liberated
Belief
Involves
Religion
Primitive
Science
Innocence
Art
Beliefs
Every
Accepted
Perception
Cataract
Level
Regression

More quotes by Arthur Koestler

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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.
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I believe that the evidence for telepathy is overwhelming and that it is a part of reality that is above science. Science allows us to glimpse [only] fragments of reality.
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...the temptation, which consisted of a single word written on the cemetary of the defeated: Sleep.
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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.
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Somebody once asked Niels Bohr why he had a horseshoe hanging above the front door of his house. Surely you, a world famous physicist, can't really believe that hanging a horseshoe above your door brings you luck? Of course not, Bohr replied, but I have been reliably informed that it will bring me luck whether I believe in it or not.
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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.
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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.
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Honor is decency without vanity.
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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.
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The discoveries of yesterday are the truisms of tomorrow, because we can add to our knowledge but cannot subtract from it.
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The 'missing link' between ape and man will probably never be found- because it was an embryo.
Arthur Koestler
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In the pun, two strings of thought are tangled into one acoustic knot.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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A writer's ambition should be to trade a hundred contemporary readers for ten readers in ten years' time and for one reader in a hundred years' time.
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History is a priori amoral it has no conscience.
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The most persistent sound which reverberates through man's history is the beating of war drums.
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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