305 Quotes by Arthur Koestler

The ‘gallows’ are not only a symbol of death, but also a symbol of cruelty, terror and irreverence for life; the common denominator of primitive savagery, medieval fanaticism and modern totalitarianism.

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.

Insight depends on the multi-dimensional analysis of the input in its various aspects, on extracting relevant messages from irrelevant noise, identifying patterns in the mosaic until it has become saturated, as it were, with meaning.

If conquerors be regarded as the engine-drivers of History, then the conquerors of thought are perhaps the pointsmen who, less conspicuous to the traveler’s eye, determine the direction of the journey.

All decisive advances in the history of scientific thought can be described in terms of mental cross-fertilization between different disciplines.

If Nature abhors the void, the mind abhors what is meaningless. Show a person an ink-blot, and he will start at once to organise it into a hierarchy of shapes, tentacles, wheels, masks, a dance of figures.

Helen Spurway concluded from the evidence of homology that the organism has only ‘a restricted mutation spectrum’ which ‘determines its possibilities of evolution’.

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.

Numbers are eternal while everything else is perishable; they are of the nature not of matter, but of mind; they permit mental operations of the most surprising and delightful kind without reference to the coarse external world of the senses-which is how the divine mind must be supposed to operate. The ecstatic contemplation of geometrical forms and mathematical laws is therefore the most effective means of purging the soul of earthly passion, and the principle link between man and divinity.