305 Quotes by Arthur Koestler

The history of science abounds with examples of discoveries greeted with howls of laughter because they seemed to be a marriage of incompatibles-until the marriage bore fruit and the alleged incompatibility of the partners turned out to derive from prejudice. The humorist, on the other hand, deliberately chooses discordant codes of behaviour or universes of discourse to expose their hidden incongruities in the resulting clash. Com.

The creative act of the humorist consisted in bringing about a momentary fusion between two habitually incompatible matrices. Scientific discovery, as we shall presently see, can be described in very similar terms-as the permanent fusion of matrices of thought previously believed to be incompatible.

At each step biochemical triggers and feedbacks determine which of the alternative developmental pathways among several possibles a group of cells will actually follow.

Illusion, then, is the simultaneous presence and interaction in the mind of two universes, one real, one imaginary. It transports the spectator from the trivial present to a plane remote from self-interest and makes him forget his own preoccupations and anxieties; in other words, it facilitates the unfolding of his participatory emotions, and inhibits or neutralizes his self-asserting tendencies.

Einstein’s space is no closer to reality than Van Gogh’s sky.

Laughter is a luxury reflex which could arise only in a creature whose reason has gained a degree of autonomy from the urges of emotion, and enables him to perceive his own emotions as redundant-to realize that he has been fooled.

Conscience renders one as unfit for the revolution as a double chin. Conscience eats through the brain like a cancer, until the whole of the grey matter is devoured.

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

Hierarchies are ‘dissectible’ into their constituent branches, on which the holons form the ‘nodes’. The number of levels which a hierarchy comprises is called its ‘depth’, and the number of holons on any given level its ‘span’.