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

Arthur Koestler Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In those days the European continent had already reached a stage where a man could be told without irony that he should be thankful to be shot and not strangled, decapitated, or beaten to death.

— Arthur Koestler

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

The curse of ‘spherism’ upon man’s vision of the universe lasted for two thousand years.

— Arthur Koestler

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

The crimes of a caligula shrink to insignificance compared to the havoc wrought by Torquemada.

— Arthur Koestler

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

Let me repeat: the principle mark of genius is not perfection, but originality, the opening of new frontiers; once this is done, the conquered territory becomes common property.

— Arthur Koestler

It is obvious’, says Hadamard, ‘that invention or discovery, be it in mathematics or anywhere else, takes place by combining ideas... The Latin verb cogito for “to think” etymologically means “to shake together”. St. Augustine had already noticed that and also observed that intelligo means “to select among”.

— Arthur Koestler

Truth is what is useful to humanity, falsehood what is harmful.

— Arthur Koestler

The feeling of fraternal warmth towards fellow beings handicapped by their social background became transformed into a self-degrading worship of the primitive, the uncouth, the humorless; of the blockheaded “class-conscious” proletarian – the cult of the lowest common denominator.

— Arthur Koestler

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.

— Arthur Koestler

He is damned always to do that which is most repugnant to him: to become a slaughterer, in order to abolish slaughtering, to sacrifice lambs so that no more lambs may be slaughtered, to whip people with knouts so that they may learn not to let themselves be whipped, to strip himself of every scruple in the name of a higher scrupulousness, and to challenge the hatred of mankind because of his love for it – an abstract and geometric love.

— Arthur Koestler

It is necessary to hammer every sentence into the masses by repetition and simplification. What is presented as right must shine like gold; what is presented as wrong must be black as pitch. For consumption by the masses, the political processes must be coloured like ginger-bread figures at a fair.

— Arthur Koestler
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