Among all forms of mentation, verbal thinking is the most articulate, the most complex, and the most vulnerable to infectious diseases. It is liable to absorb whispered suggestions, and to incorporate them as hidden persuaders into the code. Arthur Koestler More Quotes by Arthur Koestler More Quotes From Arthur Koestler man has an irrepressible tendency to read meaning into the buzzing confusion of sights and sounds impinging on his senses; and where no agreed meaning can be found, he will provide it out of his own imagination. Arthur Koestler imagination sight men Our Press and our schools cultivate Chauvinism, militarism, dogmatism, conformism and ignorance. The arbitrary power of the Government is unlimited, and unexampled in history; freedom of the Press, of opinion and of movement are as thoroughly exterminated as though the proclamation of the Rights of Man had never been. We have built up the most gigantic police apparatus, with informers made a national institution, and the most refined scientific system of political and mental torture. We whip the groaning masses of the country towards a theoretical future happiness, which only we can. Arthur Koestler ignorance country school There is only one prospect worse than being chained to an intolerable existence: The nightmare of a botched attempt to end it. Arthur Koestler suicidal nightmare sad In creating the human brain, evolution has wildly overshot the mark. Arthur Koestler creating evolution brain As modern physics started with the Newtonian revolution, so modern philosophy starts with what one might call the Cartesian Catastrophe. The catastrophe consisted in the splitting up of the world into the realms of matter and mind, and the identification of 'mind' with conscious thinking. The result of this identification was the shallow rationalism of l' esprit Cartesien, and an impoverishment of psychology which it took three centuries to remedy even in part. Arthur Koestler philosophy science thinking When a chess player looks at the board, he does not see a static mosaic, a 'still life', but a magnetic field of forces, charged with energy - as Faraday saw the stresses surrounding magnets and currents as curves in space; or as Van Gogh saw vortices in the skies of Provence. Arthur Koestler curves stress player 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 ultimate ends truth No writer or teacher or artist can escape the responsibility of influencing others whether he intends to or not, whether he is conscious of it or not. Arthur Koestler responsibility teaching teacher Chemically induced hallucinations, delusions and raptures may be frightening or wonderfully gratifying; in either case they are in the nature of confidence tricks played on one's own nervous system. Arthur Koestler hallucinations nervous may the self-assertive tendency is the dynamic expression of the holon's wholeness, the integrative tendency, the dynamic expression of its partness. Arthur Koestler society expression self [My father] loved me tenderly and shyly from a distance, and later on took a naive pride in seeing my name in print. Arthur Koestler distance pride father Show us not the aim without the way. For ends and means on earth are so entangled That changing one, you change the other too; Each different path brings other ends in view Arthur Koestler different views mean A writer's ambition should be to trade a hundred contemporary readers for ten readers in ten years' time and for one reader in a hundred years' time. Arthur Koestler hundred ambition years The thing represented had to pass through two distorting lenses: the artist's mind, and his medium of expression, before it emerged as a man-made dream - the two, of course, being intimately connected and interacting with each other. Arthur Koestler artist dream men Learn from the mistakes of others. You can't live long enough to make them all yourself. Boredom sets into boring minds. The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards. Arthur Koestler mistake discovery long Laughter and weeping, the Greek masks of comedy and tragedy, mark the extremes of a continuous spectrum; both provide channels for the overflow of emotion; both are Arthur Koestler laughter tragedy greek Einstein's space is no closer to reality than Van Gogh's sky. Arthur Koestler technology science reality The progress of science, like an ancient desert trail, is strewn with the bleached skeletons of discarded theories, doctrines, and axioms which seemed to possess eternal life. Arthur Koestler skeletons desert progress God is dethroned; and although the incognizant masses are tardy in realizing the event, they feel the icy draught caused by that vacancy. Man enters upon a spiritual ice age; the established churches can no longer provide more than Eskimo huts where their shivering flock huddles together. Arthur Koestler ice spiritual men Woe unto the defeated, whom history treads into the dust. Arthur Koestler woe-unto dust history
