305 Quotes by Arthur Koestler

The moment attention is focused on a normally automatized part-function such as ennunciating consonants, the matrix breaks down, the needle gets stuck, and the performance is paralyzed-like the centipede who was asked in which order he moved his hundred legs, and could walk no more.

In those days the European continent had already reached a stage where a man could be told without irony that he should be thankful to be shot and not strangled, decapitated, or beaten to death.

Comic discovery is paradox stated-scientific discovery is paradox resolved.

The roads that lead man to knowledge are as wondrous as that knowledge itself.

The superimposition of two systems: thought and metre,′ wrote Proust, ’is a primary element of ordered complexity, that is to say, of beauty.

In the meantime, the educated public continues to believe that Darwin has provided all the relevant answers by the magic formula of random mutations plus natural selection – quite unaware of the fact that random mutations turned out to be irrelevant and natural selection tautology.

They dreamed of power with the object of abolishing power; of ruling over the people to wean them from the habit of being ruled.

History has taught us that often lies serve her better than the truth; for man is sluggish and has to be led through the desert for forty years before each step in his development. And he has to be driven through the desert with threats and promises, by imaginary terrors and imaginary consolations, so that he should not sit down prematurely to rest and divert himself by worshipping golden calves.

Every good joke contains an element of the riddle-it may be childishly simple, or subtle and challenging-which the listener must solve. By doing so, he is lifted out of his passive role and compelled to co-operate, to repeat to some extent the process of inventing the joke, to re-create it in his imagination. The type of entertainment dished out by the mass media makes one apt to forget that true recreation is re-creation.