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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
Belief
Involves
Religion
Primitive
Science
Innocence
Art
Beliefs
Every
Accepted
Perception
Cataract
Level
Regression
Creative
Liberated

More quotes by Arthur Koestler

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I am not sure whether ethical absolutes exist. But I am sure that we have to act as if they existed or civilization perishes.
Arthur Koestler
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To want to meet an author because you like his books is as ridiculous as wanting to meet the goose because you like pate de foie gras.
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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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The most persistent sound which reverberates through man's history is the beating of war drums.
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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
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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.
Arthur Koestler
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The creativity and pathology of the human mind are, after all, two sides of the same medal coined in the evolutionary mint. The first is responsible for the splendour of our cathedrals, the second for the gargoyles that decorate them to remind us that the world is full of monsters, devils, and succubi.
Arthur Koestler
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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
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When a person identifies himself with a group his critical faculties are diminished and his passions enhanced by a kind of emotive resonance. The individual is not a killer, the group is, and by identifying with it, the individual becomes one. This is the infernal dialect reflected in man's history.
Arthur Koestler
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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.
Arthur Koestler
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A publisher who writes is like a cow in a milk bar.
Arthur Koestler
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one of the tests of a theory is that, once grasped, it appears self-evident.
Arthur Koestler
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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.
Arthur Koestler
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History is a priori amoral it has no conscience.
Arthur Koestler
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The temptations of God were always more dangerous for mankind than those of Satan.
Arthur Koestler
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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.
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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
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Woe unto the defeated, whom history treads into the dust.
Arthur Koestler
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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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the self-assertive tendency is the dynamic expression of the holon's wholeness, the integrative tendency, the dynamic expression of its partness.
Arthur Koestler