305 Quotes by Arthur Koestler

The principal mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.

Creative activity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.

The principle that the end justifies the means is and remains the only rule of political ethics; anything else is just a vague chatter and melts away between one’s fingers.

Every creative act involves... a new innocence of perception, liberated from the cataract of accepted belief.

The prerequisite of originality is the art of forgetting, at the proper moment, what we know.

Much depends on asking the right question at the right time.

... 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.

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

When one contemplates the streak of insanity running through human history, it appears highly probable that homo sapiens is a biological freak, the result of some remarkable mistake in the evolutionary process. The ancient doctrine of original sin, variants of which occur independently in the mythologies of diverse cultures, could be a reflection of man's awareness of his own inadequacy, of the intuitive hunch that somewhere along the line of his ascent something has gone wrong.