Arthur Koestler - Collected Quotes

"The ultimate truth is penultimately always a falsehood. He who will be proved right in the end appears to be wrong and harmful before it." (Arthur Koestler, "Darkness at Noon", 1940)

"Artists treat facts as stimuli for the imagination, while scientists use their imagination to coordinate facts." (Arthur Koestler, "Insight and Outlook: An Inquiry into the Common Foundations of Science, Art and Social Ethics", 1949)

"Men cannot be treated as units in operations of political arithmetic because they behave like the symbols for zero and the infinite, which dislocate all mathematical operations." (Arthur Koestler, "Crossman", 1949)

"If time is treated in modern physics as a dimension on a par with the dimensions of space, why should we a priori exclude the possibility that we are pulled as well as pushed along its axis? The future has, after all, as much or as little reality as the past, and there is nothing logically inconceivable in introducing, as a working hypothesis, an element of finality, supplementary to the element of causality, into our equations. It betrays a great lack of imagination to believe that the concept of “purpose” must necessarily be associated with some anthropomorphic deity." (Arthur Koestler, "The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe", 1959)

"Myths grow like crystals, according to their own, recurrent pattern; but there must be a suitable core to start their growth." (Arthur Koestler, "The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe", 1959)

"We can add to our knowledge, but we cannot subtract from it." (Arthur Koestler, "The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe", 1959) 

"It has been said that discovery consists in seeing an analogy which nobody had seen before." (Arthur Koestler, "The Act of Creation", 1964) 

"The moment of truth, the sudden emergence of new insight, is an act of intuition. Such intuitions give the appearance of miraculous flashes, or short circuits of reasoning. In fact they may be likened to an immersed chain, of which only the beginning and the end are visible above the surface of consciousness. The diver vanishes at one end of the chain and comes up at the other end, guided by invisible links." (Arthur Koestler, "The Act of Creation", 1964)

"The principle mark of genius is not perfection, but originality, the opening of new frontiers; once this is done, the conquered territory becomes common property." (Arthur Koestler, "The Act of Creation", 1964)

"True creativity often starts where language ends." (Arthur Koestler, "The Act of Creation", 1964)

"Without the hard little bits of marble which are called 'facts' or 'data' one cannot compose a mosaic; what matters, however, are not so much the individual bits, but the successive patterns into which you arrange them, then break them up and rearrange them." (Arthur Koestler, "The Act of Creation", 1964)

"Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual." (Arthur Koestler, "Drinkers of Infinity: Essays 1955-1967", 1967)

"The progress of science is strewn, like an ancient desert trail, with the bleached skeletons of discarded theories which once seemed to possess eternal life." (Arthur Koestler, "The Ghost in the Machine", 1967)

"Creativity in science could be described as the art of putting two and two together to make five. In other words, it consists in combining previously unrelated mental structures in such a way that you get more out of the emergent whole than you have put in." (Arthur Koestler, "Janus: A Summing Up", 1978)

"The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards." (Arthur Koestler)