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Top Arthur Koestler Quotes

Browse top 43 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Arthur Koestler.

Favorite Arthur Koestler Quotes

1. "[My father] loved me tenderly and shyly from a distance, and later on took a naive pride in seeing my name in print." ~ Arthur Koestler
2. "Ivanov- "Up to now , all revolutions have been made by moralizing diletantes. They were always in good faith and perished because of their dilettantism. We for the first time are consequent...""Yes," said Rubashov. "So consequent, that in the interests of a just distribution of land we deliberately let die of starvation about five million farmers and their families in one year. So consequent were we in the liberation of human beings from the shackles of industrial exploitation that we sent about ten million people to do forced labour in the Artic regions and the jungles of the East, under conditions similar to those of antique galley slaves. So consequent that, to settle a difference of opinion, we know only one argument: death, whether it is a matter of submarines, manure, or the Party line to be followed in Indo-China. ..." ~ Arthur Koestler
3. "...The arbitrary power of the Government is unlimited, and unexampled in history; freedom of the Press, of opinion and of movement are as thoroughly exterminated as though the proclamation of the Rights of Man had never been." ~ Arthur Koestler
4. "It was quiet in the cell. Rubashov heard only the creaking of his steps on the tiles. Six and a half steps to the door, whence they must come to fetch him, six and a half steps to the window, behind which night was falling. Soon it would be over. But when he asked himself, For what actually are you dying? he found no answer.It was a mistake in the system; perhaps it lay in the precept which until now he had held to be uncontestable, in whose name he had sacrificed others and was himself being sacrificed: in the precept, that the end justifies the means. It was this sentence which had killed the great fraternity of the Revolution and made them run amuck. What had he once written in his diary? "We have thrown overboard all conventions, our sole guiding principle is that of consequent logic; we are sailing without ethical ballast." ~ Arthur Koestler
5. "Courage is never to let your actions be influenced by your fears." ~ Arthur Koestler
6. "The principle mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers." ~ Arthur Koestler
7. "Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual." ~ Arthur Koestler
8. "The progress of science is strewn, like an ancient desert trail, with the bleached skeleton of discarded theories which once seemed to possess eternal life." ~ Arthur Koestler
9. "Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion." ~ Arthur Koestler
10. "The prerequisite of originality is the art of forgetting, at the proper moment, what we know." ~ Arthur Koestler
11. "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." ~ Arthur Koestler
12. "The most persistent sound which reverberates through man's history is the beating of war drums." ~ Arthur Koestler
13. "True creativity often starts where language ends." ~ Arthur Koestler
14. "One may not regard the world as a sort of metaphysical brothel for emotions." ~ Arthur Koestler
15. "The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards." ~ Arthur Koestler
16. "Show us not the aim without the way.For ends and means on earth are so entangledThat changing one, you change the other too;Each different path brings other ends in view" ~ Arthur Koestler
17. "History had a slow pulse; man counted in years, history in generations" ~ Arthur Koestler
18. "Honor is decency without vanity." ~ Arthur Koestler
19. "The Party denied the free will of the individual - and at the sametime it exacted his willing self-sacrifice. It denied his capacity tochoose between two alternatives - and at the same time it demanded that heshould constantly choose the right one. It denied his power to distinguishgood and evil - and at the same time spoke pathetically of guilt andtreachery. The individual stood under the sign of economic fatality, awheel in a clockwork which had been wound up for all eternity and couldnot be stopped or influenced - and the Party demanded that the wheelshould revolt against the clockwork and change its course. There wassomewhere an error in the calculation; the equation did not work out." ~ Arthur Koestler
20. "Hitherto man had to live with the idea of death as an individual; from now onward mankind will have to live with the idea of its death as a species." ~ Arthur Koestler
21. "that man is a reality, mankind an abstraction; that men cannot be treated as units in operations of political arithmetic because they behave like the symbols for zero and the infinite, which dislocate all mathematical operations; that the end justifies the means only within very narrow limits; that ethics is not a function of social utility, and charity not a petty bourgeois sentiment but the gravitational force which keeps civilization in its orbit." ~ Arthur Koestler
22. "Cigarettes to be fetched for me from the canteen,' said Rubashov.'Have you got prison vouchers?''My money was taken from me on my arrival,' said Rubashov. 'Then you must wait until it has been changed for vouchers.''How long will that take in this model establishment of yours?' asked Rubashov. 'You can write a letter of complaint,' said the old man.'You know quite well that I have neither paper nor pencil,' said Rubashov. 'To buy writing materials you have to have vouchers,' said the warder." ~ Arthur Koestler
23. "Only once did he remark when the starter,which he was trying to open,literally fell to pieces in his hands,:'If you would write for those filthy boulevard papers,monsieur,you could soon buy a Chevrolet'(which was quite unture:In France the prostitutes of the pen were just as badly rewarded as their colleagues on the street corners)." ~ Arthur Koestler
24. "I have already thought it over,' said Rubashov. 'I reject your proposition. Logically, you may be right. But I have had enough of this kind of logic. I am tired and I don't want to play this game anymore. Be kind enough to have me taken back to my cell." ~ Arthur Koestler
25. "Aberrations of the human mind are to a large extent due to the obsessional pursuit of some part-truth, treated as if it were a whole truth." ~ Arthur Koestler
26. "... on the historical scale, the damages wrought by individual violence for selfish motives are insignificant compared to the holocausts resulting from self-transcending devotion to collectively shared belief-systems. It is derived from primitive identification instead of mature social integration; it entails the partial surrender of personal responsibility and produces the quasi-hypnotic phenomena of group-psychology." ~ Arthur Koestler
27. "For in a struggle one must have both legs firmly planted on theearth. The Party had taught one how to do it. The infinite was apolitically suspect quantity, the `I' a suspect quality. The Party did notrecognize its existence. The definition of an individual was: a multitudeof one million divided by one million." ~ Arthur Koestler
28. "The life we led was a proof of man's capacity for adaptation.I think that even the condemned souls in purgatory after time develop a sort of homely routine.That is ,by the way, why most prison memoirs are unreadable.The difficulty of conveying to the reader an idea of a nightmare world from which he has emerged makes the author depict the prisoner's state of mind as an uninterruped continuity of despair.He fears to appear frivolous or to spoil his effect by admitting that even in the depths of misery cheerfulness keeps breaking in." ~ Arthur Koestler
29. "There was a dense fog in my brain,impenetrable to any coherent thought,except the dull obsession of counting the minutes - an aching state of semi concsiousness and numb idiocy." ~ Arthur Koestler
30. "But who will be proved right? It will only be known later. Meanwhile he is bound to act on credit and sell his soul to the devil, in the hope of history's absolution." ~ Arthur Koestler
31. "O progresso da ciência, tal como uma antiga trilha no deserto, está juncado pelos descolorados esqueletos de teorias rejeitadas, que um dia pareceram ter vida eterna." ~ Arthur Koestler
32. "Our White - Whites were a mixed crowd,including a well - known doctor,owner of a chateau near Versailles,an opera singer with an enormous belly and a chaplainbass;a homosexual architect with a beard,two night club porters,and a lawyer who sold Jewish refugees visas for a Central American Republic,which on arrival turned out to be non valid." ~ Arthur Koestler
33. "Rubashov had always believed that he knew himself rather well. Being without moral prejudices, he had no illusions about the phenomenon called the "first person singular" and had taken for granted, without particular emotion, that this phenomenon was endowed with certain impulses which people are generally reluctant to admit. Now, when he stood with his forehead against the window or suddenly stopped on the third black tile, he made unexpected discoveries. He found that those processes wrongly known as monologues are really dialogues of a special kind - dialogues in which one partner remains silent while the other, against all grammatical rules, addresses him as "I" instead of "you," in order to creep into his confidence and to fathom his intentions, but the silent partner just remains silent, shuns observation, and even refuses to be localized in time and space." ~ Arthur Koestler
34. "Nothing is worse in prison than the consciousness of one's innocenc; it prevents acclimatizatin and undermines one's morale..." ~ Arthur Koestler
35. "Perhaps he did not know himself - like all these intellectual cynics..." ~ Arthur Koestler
36. "Revolutionary theory had frozen to a dogmatic cult, with a simplified, easily graspable catechism, and with No. 1 as the high priest celebrating the Mass." ~ Arthur Koestler
37. "With you, thought Rubashov and looked at the whitewashed wall behind which the other stood—in the meantime he hadprobably lit a cigarette and was blowing the smoke against the wall — with you I have no accounts to settle. To you I oweno fare. Between you and us there is no common currency and no common language. ... Well, what do you want now?" ~ Arthur Koestler
38. "Satan, on the contrary, is thin, ascetic and a fanatical devotee of logic. He reads Machiavelli, Ignatius of Loyola, Marx and Hegel; he is cold and unmerciful to mankind, out of a kind of mathematical mercifulness. 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
39. "Our Press and our schools cultivate Chauvinism, militarism, dogmatism, conformism and ignorance. The arbitrary power of the Government is unlimited, and unexampled in history; freedom of the Press, of opinion and of movement are as thoroughly exterminated as though the proclamation of the Rights of Man had never been. We have built up the most gigantic police apparatus, with informers made a national institution, and the most refined scientific system of political and mental torture. We whip the groaning masses of the country towards a theoretical future happiness, which only we can." ~ Arthur Koestler
40. "Scientists are peeping toms at the keyhole of eternity." ~ Arthur Koestler
41. "A publisher who writes is like a cow in a milk bar." ~ Arthur Koestler
42. "Prometheus is reaching out for the stars with an empty grin on his face." ~ Arthur Koestler
43. "History knows no scruples and no hesitation. Inert and unnering flows towards her goal. History knows herway. She makes no mistakes." ~ Arthur Koestler

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Today's Quote

Michael Jackson wanted to be in Men in Black II. He told me he had seen the first Men in Black in Paris and had stayed behind and sat there and wept. I had to explain to him that it was a comedy."
Author: Barry Sonnenfeld

What Did Arthur Koestler Talk About?

Wit
Per
Ear
Con
Ten
Lit
Thou
Era
End
Act
Tan
Self
Owe
Story
Ally
Son
Hen
Individual
Mean
Though
Bee
Thin
Here
Each
Ears
Bit
Himself
Star
Mad
Call
Cat
Hey
She
Tea
Able
Low
Use
Ought
Read
Pen
Original
Ring
Logic
Chin
Taken
Prison
Evolution
Opinion
Rate
Party

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