Arthur Koestler Quotes

God seems to have left the receiver off the hook and time is running out.

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.

The moment of truth, the sudden emergence of a new insight, is an act of intuition. Such intuitions give the appearance of miraculous flushes, or short-circuits of reasoning. In fact they may be likened to an immersed chain, of which only the beginning and the end are visible above the surface of consciousness. The diver vanishes at one end of the chain and comes up at the other end, guided by invisible links.

Creativity in science could be described as the act of putting two and two together to make five

Habit is the denial of creativity and the negation of freedom; a self-imposed straitjacket of which the wearer is unaware.

The progress of science, like an ancient desert trail, is strewn with the bleached skeletons of discarded theories, doctrines, and axioms which seemed to possess eternal life.

The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.

I am not sure whether ethical absolutes exist. But I am sure that we have to act as if they existed or civilization perishes.

Some of the greatest discoveries...consist mainly in the clearing away of psychological roadblocks which obstruct the approach to reality; which is why,post factum they appear so obvious.

The fact is: I no longer believe in my own infallibility. That is why I am lost.

[My father] loved me tenderly and shyly from a distance, and later on took a naive pride in seeing my name in print.

There is an abundance of ancient place names in the Ukraine and Poland, which derive from 'Khazar' or 'Zhid' (Jew).

Most of us were not afraid of death, only of the act of dying; and there were times when we overcame even this fear. At such moments we were free-men without shadows, dismissed from the ranks of the mortal; it was the most complete experience of freedom that can be granted a man.

Prometheus is reaching out for the stars with an empty grin on his face.

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.

...the temptation, which consisted of a single word written on the cemetary of the defeated: Sleep.

The story of the Khazar Empire, as it slowly emerges from the past, begins to look like the most cruel hoax which history has ever perpetrated.

One question that people always ask at home is never asked here: "What happened to Communism in Russia?" Everybody yawns when a visitor brings it up, because the answer is so obvious to every Russian. The answer is that there never was Communism in Russia; there were only communists.

One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up.

Creativity is the defeat of habit by originality.