Arthur Koestler
Arthur Koestler was born on 5 September 1905 in Budapest, a city whose cultural and political textures shaped the early circumstances of a life that would span several nations and languages. He held citizenship in Hungary, Austria, and ultimately the United Kingdom, and he worked fluently across German, French, and English — a trilingual range that accompanied his movement through the overlapping worlds of Central European and British intellectual life. He received his education at the Technische Universität Wien before pursuing the careers that would define his public reputation.
Those careers were notably varied. Koestler worked as a journalist, novelist, philosopher, political scientist, autobiographer, and screenwriter, moving between forms and disciplines over the course of his writing life. Among his notable works were Darkness at Noon, The Yogi and the Commissar, The Sleepwalkers, and The Thirteenth Tribe — a body of writing that crossed fiction, argument, and inquiry. His contributions were recognized with the Sonning Prize and an appointment as Commander of the Order of the British Empire, distinctions that acknowledged the breadth and persistence of his engagement with letters and ideas.
Koestler died on 1 March 1983 in London, the city in which his life ended as a British citizen. He had lived and written across multiple languages and national identities, and it was in London, in the country whose citizenship he held, that his long career as a writer, journalist, and thinker came to its close.
Quotes by Arthur Koestler
Arthur Koestler's insights on:
"The most persistent sound which reverberates through man's history is the beating of war drums."
Snobbery is not merely a silly human weakness but something basic in the mentality of modern man a symptom which reflects the general sickness, the dislocation of social and cultural values in contemporary civilization.
The most persistent sound, which reverberates through men's history, is the beating of war drums.
Coincidence may be described as the chance encounter of two unrelated causal chains which
coincidence may be described as the chance encounter of two unrelated causal chains which miraculously, it seems merge into a significant event.
The most persistent sound which reverberates through men's history is the beating of war drums.
Since we cannot in the foreseeable future expect the necessary change in human nature to arise by way of a spontaneous mutation, that is, by natural means, we must induce it by artificial means. We can only hope to survive as a species by developing techniques which supplant biological evolution. We must search for a cure for the schizophysiology inherent in man’s nature, and the resulting split in our minds, which led to the situation in which we find ourselves.
But the revival of a dynamic psychology which reinstated the academic respectability of such terms as curiosity, exploratory drive, purpose, only came about when experimental evidence showed that even in the rat the urge to explore may prevail over hunger and fear.
The philosophy of nature evolved by occasional leaps and bounds alternating with delusional pursuits, culs-de-sac, regressions, periods of blindness, and amnesia. The great discoveries which determined its course were sometimes the unexpected by-products of a chase after quite different hares. At other times, the process of discovery consisted merely in the cleaning away of the rubbish that blocked the path, or in the rearranging of existing items of knowledge in a different pattern.