Arthur Koestler's Quotes

Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.

Courage is never to let your actions be influenced by your fears.

The principle mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.

The prerequisite of originality is the art of forgetting, at the proper moment, what we know.

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.

The progress of science is strewn, like an ancient desert trail, with the bleached skeleton of discarded theories which once seemed to possess eternal life.

Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion.

True creativity often starts where language ends.

One may not regard the world as a sort of metaphysical brothel for emotions.

The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.

The most persistent sound which reverberates through man's history is the beating of war drums.

Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history; at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that the end justifies the means.

A publisher who writes is like a cow in a milk bar.

Prometheus is reaching out for the stars with an empty grin on his face.

Scientists are peeping toms at the keyhole of eternity.

The definition of the individual was: a multitude of one million divided by one million.