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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 22e09e5 | Forgery is just the most dramatic example of the importance of origin. Arthur Koestler described a friend who owned a drawing that she first took to be a reproduction. When she later discovered that it was an original by Picasso, she displayed it more prominently, claimed that she saw it differently, and enjoyed it more. For her, its value went up. | Paul Bloom | ||
| d60815d | Leaving controversial issues aside, the first and main purpose of this book may be summed up by a phrase of Laplace: "If we were able to make an exact catalogue of all particles and forces which are active in a speck of dust, the laws of the universe at large would hold no more mysteries for us". On a medium-sized school globe the State of Israel occupies not much more space than a speck of dust; and yet there is hardly a political, social .. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| 29f7ef4 | Una vez hubo un matematico que dijo que el algebra era una ciencia para la gente perezosa, puesto que uno no conoce el valor de X,pero opera con el como si lo conociese. En nuestro caso, X representa a las masas anonimas, al pueblo. La politica es el arte de hacer operaciones con esta X sin preocuparse por conocer su naturaleza real, mientras que hacer historia consiste en dar a X el valor exacto que debe tener en la ecucion. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| 85695b5 | The prerequisite of originality is the art of forgetting, at the proper moment, what we know. | creation creativity forgetting originality | Arthur Koestler | |
| e6fb36d | Art, like religion, is a school of self-transcendence; it expands individual awareness into cosmic awareness, as science teaches us to reduce any particular puzzle to the great universal puzzle. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| 3f212de | It is not difficult to imagine the Catholic Church adopting, after a Tychonic transition, the Copernican cosmology some 200 years earlier than she eventually did. The Galileo affair was an isolated episode in the history of relations between science and theology. But its dramatic circumstances, magnified out of all proportion, created a popular belief that science stood for freedom, the Church for oppression of thought. Some historians wish.. | science-vs-religion | Arthur Koestler | |
| 6cda9f4 | on the historical scale, the damages wrought by individual violence for selfish motives are insignificant compared to the holocausts resulting from self-transcending devotion to collectively shared belief-systems. It is derived from primitive identification instead of mature social integration; it entails the partial surrender of personal responsibility and produces the quasi-hypnotic phenomena of group-psychology. | depersonalization disease evil violence | Arthur Koestler | |
| 4ac1494 | Let me repeat: the crimes of violence committed for selfish personal motives are historically insignificant compared to those committed ad majoram gloriam Dei, out of a self-sacrificing devotion to a flag, a leader, a religious faith, or a political conviction. Man has always been prepared not only to kill but also to die for good, bad or completely futile causes. And what can be a more valid proof of the reality of the self-transcending ur.. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| 277614b | Sympathy, conscience, disgust, despair, repentance, and atonement are for us repellent debauchery. To sit down and let oneself be hypnotized by one's own navel, to turn up one's eyes and humbly offer the back of one's neck to Gletkin's revolver--that is an easy solution. The greatest temptation for the like of us is: to renounce violence, to repent, to make peace with oneself. Most great revolutionaries fell before this temptation, from Spa.. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| fa8cbc2 | Each wrong idea we follow is a crime committed against future generations. | history politics | Arthur Koestler | |
| bf5bfe0 | 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. | humanity revolution righteousness truth | Arthur Koestler | |
| f3a5ba0 | Saints and mystics spend their lives trying to escape the prison of the flesh; | Arthur Koestler | ||
| d5536a4 | Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| 9659e26 | To quote Dr. Ewer: 'Behaviour will tend to be always a jump ahead of structure and so play a decisive role in the evolutionary process.' In this light, evolution no longer appears as a tale told by an idiot, but rather as an epic recited by a stutterer-at times haltingly and painfully, then precipitating in bursts. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| 081a9a7 | When 'consciousness' is unawares transferred from great things to small' - which Spencer regarded as the prime cause of laughter-the result will be either a comic or an aesthetic experience, depending on whether the person's emotions are of the type capable of participating in the transfer or not. The artist, reversing the parodist's technique, walks on a tightrope, as it were, along the line where the exalted and the trivial planes meet; h.. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| 848d5db | But at keast we know that the Brotherhood was both a scientific academy and a monastic order; that its members led an ascetic communal life where all property was shared, thus anticipating the Essenes and the primitive Christian communities. We know that much of their time was spent in contemplation, and that initiation into the higher mysteries of mathematics, astronomy, and medicine depended upon the purification of spirit and body, which.. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| 0ed4f86 | Israel's rebirth as a nation after two thousand years is a freak phenomenon of history. But in all the branches of science the observation of freak phenomena yields important clues to general laws. Dwarf stars and human giants, radioactivity and parthenogenesis, prophets, maniacs and saints are all freaks which carry the conditions of normality to a pointed and profiled extreme. So does this race of eternal victims with its flayed skin and .. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| 19bb854 | The earliest discovery of Pasteur, and for him the most exciting in all his life, was the asymmetry of molecules as a specific characteristic of living organisms-in other words, the fact that the molecules of living matter come in two varieties which, though chemically identical, are in their spatial structure like mirror images to each other-or like right and left gloves. 'Left-handed' molecules rotate polarized light to the left, 'right-h.. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| 76a7db2 | This was written before the full extent of the holocaust was known, but that does not alter the fact that the large majority of surviving Jews in the world is of Eastern European - | Arthur Koestler | ||
| 6b81390 | Thus experience, both of the exalted and trivial kind, indicates that the mind is particularly receptive to and suggestible by messages which arrive in a rhythmic pattern, or accompanied by a rhythmic pattern. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| 897f554 | Emphasis and implication are complementary techniques. The first bullies the audience into acceptance; the second entices it into mental collaboration; the first forces the offer down the consumer's throat; the second tantalizes, to whet his appetite. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| ca0b051 | Why, if evolution were a free for all, restrained only by selection for fitness, why did Australia not produce some of the bug-eyed monsters of science fiction? The only moderately unorthodox creation of that isolated island in a hundred million years are the kangaroos and wallabies; the rest of its fauna consists of rather poor replicas of more efficient placental types-vatiations on a limited number of archetypal themes. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| 434c62e | Complexity of thought is no measure of originality. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| 027eeca | The distance between the library and the bedroom is astronomical | intelligentsia | Arthur Koestler | |
| fab7eac | One conclusion which emerged from this imaginary operation was that all changes in electric and magnetic force (for instance, those caused by an oscillating circuit) sent waves spreading through space; and that these waves had the same transverse character, and the same speed, as light. 'We can scarcely avoid the inference', he wrote in a monumental sentence, 'that light consists in the transverse undulations of the same medium which is the.. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| 41713b8 | Lastly, he hit on the idea of transferring the observer's position into the centre of the world, and to examine the variations in angular velocity, regardless of distance, as seen from the sun. And lo! it worked. The results were even more gratifying than he had expected. Saturn, for instance, when farthest away from the sun, in its aphelion, moves at the rate of 106 seconds arc per day; when closest to the sun, and its speed is at maximum,.. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| c471be4 | The eight sin, deadlier than all- self transcendence through misplaced devotion-is not included in the list. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| 33ce3cd | Every year several million people are killed quite pointlessly by epidemics and other natural catastrophes. And we should shrink from sacrificing a few hundred thousand for the most promising experiment in history? Not to mention the legions of those who die of under-nourishment and tuberculosis in coal and quicksilver mines, rice-fields and cotton plantations. No one takes any notice of them; nobody asks why or what for; but if here we sho.. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| f39b9e6 | The Eureka act proper, the moment of truth experienced by the creative individual, is paralleled on the collective plane by the emergence, out of the scattered fragments, of a new synthesis, brought about by a quick succession of individual discoveries-where, characteristically, the same discovery is often made by several individuals at the same time. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| 10d676f | In the immortal parable of the Cave, where men stand in their chains backs to the light , perceiving only the play of shadows on the wall, unaware that these are but shadows, unaware of the luminous reality outside the Cave-in this allegory of the human condition, Plato hit an archetypal chord as pregnant with echoes as Pythagoras' Harmony of the Spheres. But when we think of Neoplatonism and scholasticism as concrete philosophies and prece.. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| 820fbad | For Pythagoras as for Kepler, the two kinds of contemplation were twins; for them philosophy and religion were motivated by the same longing : to catch glimpses of eternity through the window of time. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| 821fe8e | If Nature abhors the void, the mind abhors what is meaningless. Show a person an ink-blot, and he will start at once to organise it into a hierarchy of shapes, tentacles, wheels, masks, a dance of figures. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| c059786 | Matrices vary from fully automatized skills to those with a high degree of plasticity; but even the latter are controlled by rules of the game which function below the level of awareness. These silent codes can be regarded as condensations of learning into habit. Habits are the indispensable core of stability and ordered behaviour; they also have a tendency to become mechanized and to reduce man to the status of a conditioned automaton. The.. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| b2c10cd | The growth of the nervous system from beginning to end is dominated by 'a totally integrated matrix, and not a progressive integration of primarily individuated units'. The organism is not a sum of its reflexes, but on the contrary 'the mechanism of the total pattern is an essential component of the performance of the part, i.e. the reflex'. The stimulus-response scheme cannot explain even embryonic behaviour, because movements appear long .. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| 1d9d2a2 | Though I no longer liked him or respected him, the thought of his disapproval frightened me. | Walter Kirn | ||
| d732c16 | I could see tall ideas standing up behind his eyes. | Walter Kirn | ||
| a6e7d81 | His thoughts were clearly still shoving him further away, toward some ultimate dark drama that he might or might not have actually lived through but whose telling would let out the pressure inside his skull. | Walter Kirn | ||
| 2f8eea6 | Central Wyoming was like hell without the flames, an underworld thrust up onto the surface. | Walter Kirn | ||
| 253b0ef | I understood that no one lives forever, but there are certain people whose power and presence so thoroughly penetrate your view of things that contemplating their absence feels as strange as imagining having never been born yourself. | Walter Kirn | ||
| 54ad404 | We were all journalists, professional truth-seekers, but one thing we knew about the truth that laymen were prone to disregard was that it need not be literal or factual; the unpredictable human personality was itself a fact. | truth writing | Walter Kirn | |
| c649719 | Leslie Titmuss bothered me. His name, it made me want to sneeze. I also thought I recognized it. I typed it into my laptop, a procedure that had lately held far too much suspense for me. Among the top results the search returned was a page from GoodReads, a literary website. | Walter Kirn | ||
| d69ee9b | Humans are so wonderful. [Alucard Hellsing] | Kohta Hirano | ||
| 6eec1f0 | He wants people to become true Christians by following him, not just doing what he said but letting him live in our lives. | Jerry B. Jenkins | ||
| 74c1242 | curfew, | Jerry B. Jenkins |