The principle mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers. Arthur Koestler More Quotes by Arthur Koestler More Quotes From Arthur Koestler Aggressiveness is not the main trouble with the human species, but rather an excess capacity for fanatical devotion. Arthur Koestler excess devotion trouble Every creative act – in science, art, or religion – involves a regression to a more primitive level, a new innocence of perception liberated from the cataract of accepted beliefs. Arthur Koestler perception creative art Wars are not fought for territory, but for words. Man's deadliest weapon is language. He is as susceptible to being hypnotized by slogans as he is to infectious diseases. And where there is an epidemic, the group-mind takes over. Arthur Koestler epidemics men war One question that people always ask at home is never asked here: "What happened to Communism in Russia?" Everybody yawns when a visitor brings it up, because the answer is so obvious to every Russian. The answer is that there never was Communism in Russia; there were only communists. Arthur Koestler russia home people One may not regard the world as a sort of metaphysical brothel for emotions. Arthur Koestler emotion may world The prerequisite of originality is the art of forgetting, at the proper moment, what we know. Arthur Koestler originality creativity art The Régime did not want Communists; it wanted robots. It will take at least a generation to change them back into humans again. Arthur Koestler robots generations want Conscious and unconscious experiences do not belong to different compartments of the mind; they form a continuous scale of gradations, of degrees of awareness. Arthur Koestler degrees different mind Space-ships and time machines are no escape from the human condition. Let Othello subject Desdemona to a lie-detector test; his jealousy will still blind him to the evidence. Let Oedipus triumph over gravity; he won't triumph over his fate. Arthur Koestler fate technology lying Creativity is the defeat of habit by originality. Arthur Koestler originality defeat creativity Zen is to religion what a Japanese "rock garden" is to a garden. Zen knows no god, no afterlife, no good and no evil, as the rock-garden knows no flowers, herbs or shrubs. It has no doctrine or holy writ: its teaching is transmitted mainly in the form of parables as ambiguous as the pebbles in the rock-garden which symbolise now a mountain, now a fleeting tiger. When a disciple asks "What is Zen?", the master's traditional answer is "Three pounds of flax" or "A decaying noodle" or "A toilet stick" or a whack on the pupil's head. Arthur Koestler garden flower teaching The greatest temptation for the like of us is: to renounce violence, to repent, to make peace with oneself. Most revolutionaries fell before this temptation, from Spartacus to Danton and Dostoevsky; they are the classical form of betrayal of the cause. The temptations of God were always more dangerous for mankind than those of Satan. As long as chaos dominates the world, God is an anachronism; and every compromise with one’s own conscience is perfidy. When the accursed inner voice speaks to you, hold your hands over your ears…. Arthur Koestler betrayal voice hands The inner defenses are unconscious. They consist of a kind of magic aura which the mind builds around cherished belief. Arguments which penetrate into the magic aura are not dealt with rationally but by a specific type of pseudo-reasoning. Absurdities and contradictions are made acceptable by specious rationalizations. Arthur Koestler magic atheism mind If the creator has a purpose in equipping us with a neck, he surely would have meant for us to stick it out. Arthur Koestler innovation purpose courage When reality becomes unbearable, the mind must withdraw from it and create a world of artificial perfection. Plato's world of pure Ideas and Forms, which alone is to be considered as real, whereas the world of nature which we perceive is merely its cheap Woolworth copy, is a flight into delusion. Arthur Koestler real plato ideas The individual is not a killer, but the group is, and by identifying with it the individual is transformed into a killer. Arthur Koestler killers groups society Wherever we find orderly, stable systems in Nature, we find that they are hierarchically structured, for the simple reason that without such structuring of complex systems into sub-assemblies, there could be no order and stability- except the order of a dead universe filled with a uniformly distributed gas. Arthur Koestler society simple order All "if" statements about the past are as dubious as prophecies of the future are. It seems fairly plausible that if Alexander or Ghengis Khan had never been born, some other individual would have filled his place and executed the design of the Hellenic or Mongolic expansion; but the Alexanders of philosophy and religion, of science and art, seem less expendable; their impact seems less determined by economic challenges and social pressures; and they seem to have a much wider range of possibilities to influence the direction, shape and texture of civilizations. Arthur Koestler philosophy past art The moment of truth, the sudden emergence of a new insight, is an act of intuition. Arthur Koestler short-circuit intuition moments Somebody once asked Niels Bohr why he had a horseshoe hanging above the front door of his house. Surely you, a world famous physicist, can't really believe that hanging a horseshoe above your door brings you luck? Of course not, Bohr replied, but I have been reliably informed that it will bring me luck whether I believe in it or not. Arthur Koestler house doors believe
