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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 2b5cb6c | The creative act of the humorist consisted in bringing about a momentary fusion between two habitually incompatible matrices. Scientific discovery, as we shall presently see, can be described in very similar terms-as the permanent fusion of matrices of thought previously believed to be incompatible. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| b7fdc58 | Comic discovery is paradox stated-scientific discovery is paradox resolved. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| e4165e5 | They looked like the meeting of a provincial town council, and were preparing the greatest revolution in human history. They were at that time a handful of men of an entirely new species: militant philosophers. They were as familiar with the prisons in the towns of Europe as commercial travellers with the hotels. They dreamed of power with the object of abolishing power; of ruling over the people to wean them from the habit of being ruled. .. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| 695e155 | while language facilitates communication within the group, it also crystallises cultural differences, and actually heightens the barriers between groups. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| 28981e4 | Insight depends on the multi-dimensional analysis of the input in its various aspects, on extracting relevant messages from irrelevant noise, identifying patterns in the mosaic until it has become saturated, as it were, with meaning. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| 87f29ee | There is a strangely consistent parallel between Copernicus' character, and the humble, devious manner in which the Copernican revolution entered through the back door of history, preceded by the apologetic remark: 'Please don't take seriously - it is all meant in fun, for mathematicians only, and highly improbable indeed. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| fa2bf90 | Dreaming could be described as a de-differentiation of reasoning-matrices and even, up to a point, of personal identity. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| a3709d4 | The conditions for original thinking are when two or more streams of research begin to offer evidence that they may converge and so in some manner be combined. It is the combination which can generate new directions of research, and through these it may be found that basic units and activities may have properties not before suspected which open up a lot of new questions for experimental study. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| 4c53da6 | But there exist other, different, methods of infolding-obliquity, compression, and the Seven Types of Ambiguity-a modest estimate of Empson's. The later Joyce, for instance, makes one realize why the German word for writing poetry is 'dichten'- to condense (certainly more poetical than 'composing', i.e. 'putting together'; but perhaps less poetical than the Hungarian kolteni-to hatch). Freud actually believed that to condense or compress se.. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| 316230e | Only geniuses preserve their infantile voracity for 'becauses'-and the naive hope that there are real answers to every question. 'Why is the moon round? Why does the apple fall from the tree? Why are there five planets instead of twenty , and why do they move as they do? Why does milk go sour? Why could the dairymaid not get the pox? Why is the colour of a sailor's blood in the tropics a brighter red than in Hamburg? Why did the frog's legs.. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| c3e99a0 | What was more humiliating, I wondered: having to beg for someone's cold chicken bones or being offered them? | Walter Kirn | ||
| 748d38e | I have no illusions about the prospects of the theory I am proposing: it will suffer the inevitable fate of being proven wrong in many, or most, details, by new advances in psychology and neurology. What I am hoping for is that it will be found to contain a shadowy pattern of truth, and that it may stimulate those who search for unity in the diverse manifestations of human thought and emotion. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| 1c8bdf7 | Genetic atomism is dead. Hereditary stability and hereditary change are both based, not on a mosaic of genes, but on the action of the gene-complex 'as a whole'. But this face-saving expression-which is now coming into increased use-is empty, like so many other holistic formulations, unless we interpolate between the gene-complex as a whole, and the individual gene, a hierarchy of genetic sub-assemblies-self-regulating holons of heredity, w.. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| 9afbdb3 | The only way out of this cul-de-sac seems to be to substitute for genetic atomism, which has so drastically broken down, the concept of the genetic micro-hierarchy, with its own built-in rules, that permit a great amount of variation, but only in limited directions on a limited number of themes. This really amounts to the revival of an ancient idea which goes back to Goethe-and even further to Plato. The point is worth a short historical di.. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| 2762115 | Neither mystic insights, nor philosophic wisdom, nor creative power can be provided by pill or injection. The psycho-pharmacist cannot add to the faculties of the brain-but he can, at best, eliminate obstructions and blockages which impede their proper use. He cannot aggrandise us-but he can, within limits, normalise us; he cannot put additional circuits into the brain, but he can, again within limits, improve the co-ordination between exis.. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| a08ea2d | I have coined the term 'bisociation' in order to make a distinction between the routine skills of thinking on a single 'plane', as it were, and the creative act, which, as I shall try to show, always operates on more than one plane. The former may be called single-minded, the latter a double-minded, transitory state of unstable equilibrium where the balance of both emotion and thought is disturbed. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| e475270 | skephtomoun oti pragmatika eimaste geloioi na dinoume tose semasia ston idiaitero kharaktera tou kathena* poso ligo metraei to ti einai enas anthropos kai poso pio megale semasia dinoume sto leitourgema pou tou epiballei e koinonia. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| d3e85bf | The history of science abounds with examples of discoveries greeted with howls of laughter because they seemed to be a marriage of incompatibles-until the marriage bore fruit and the alleged incompatibility of the partners turned out to derive from prejudice. The humorist, on the other hand, deliberately chooses discordant codes of behaviour or universes of discourse to expose their hidden incongruities in the resulting clash. Com | Arthur Koestler | ||
| 23cb70a | The Russells arrive at the same conclusion: "There is certainly no evidence from mamamalian behaviour that social aggression is more prevalent or intense among carnivores than among herbivores. And as for humans: "There is certainly no evidence that social violence has been more prevalent or intense in carnivorous hunting than in vegetarian agricultural societies. Hunting people have sometimes been extremely war-like; but no human group has.. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| afee71a | On successively higher levels of the hierarchy we find more complex, flexible and less predictable patterns of activity, while on successively lower levels we find more and more mechanised, stereotyped and predictable patterns. In the language of the physicist, a holon on a higher level of the hierarchy has more degrees of freedom than a holon on a lower level. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| e925ad7 | The two together-intellectual illumination and emotional catharsis-are the essence of the aesthetic experience. The first constitutes the moment of truth; the second provides the experience of beauty. The two are complementary aspects of an indivisible process-that 'earthing' process where 'the infinite is made to blend itself with the finite, to stand visible, as it were, attainable there' (Carlyle). | Arthur Koestler | ||
| 53f449f | But it was Poincare who wrote that what guided him in his unconscious gropings towards the 'happy combinations' which yield new discoveries was 'the feeling of mathematical beauty, of the harmony of number, of forms, of geometric elegance. This is a true aesthetic feeling that all mathematicians know.' The greatest among mathematicians and scientists, from Kepler to Einstein, made similar confessions. 'Beauty is the first test; there is no .. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| 8f5aa71 | Lastly, the vast number of existing animal species (about one million) and the small number of major classes (about fifty) and of major phyla or divisions (about ten), could be compared with the vast number of works of literature and the small number of basic themes or plots. All works of literature are variations on a limited number of leitmotivs, derived from man's archetypal experiences and conflicts, but adapted each time to a new envir.. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| 3526654 | These waves, then, on which I sit, coming out of nothing, travelling through a non-medium in multi-dimensional non-space, are the ultimate answer modern physics has to offer to man's question after the nature of reality. The waves that seem to constitute matter are interpreted by some physicists as completely immaterial 'waves of probability' marking out 'disturbed areas' where an electron is likely to 'occur'. They are as immaterial as the.. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| f8d8c6c | There is only a limited number of plots, recurring down the ages, derived from an even more limited number of basic patterns-the conflicts, paradoxes, and predicaments inherent in man's condition. And if we continue the stripping game, we find that all these paradoxes and predicaments arose from conflicts between incompatible frames of experience or scales of value, illuminated in consciousness by the bisociative act. In this final illumina.. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| 994e804 | The problem of the planetary orbits had been hopelessly bogged down in its purely geometrical frame of reference, and when Kepler realized that he could not get it unstuck, he tore it out of that frame and removed it into the field of physics. This operation of removing a problem from its traditional context and placing it into a new one, looking at it through glasses of of a different colour as it were, has always seemed to me of the very .. | Arthur Koestler | ||
| 00da6f8 | truth from him, is a swan dive through a mirror into a whirlpool. | Walter Kirn | ||
| e450c75 | It looked like just the sort of family Americans dream of having: dumb and loving. | Walter Kirn | ||
| ee2c4e8 | Our faith was a flickering flame. | Walter Kirn | ||
| c433484 | They were gray, staring, bottomless, blank, fallen eyes whose pupils played scenes of heaven upside down. | Walter Kirn | ||
| 6fd6f78 | Eyewitness News' is a clever plot to convince us that all the important events are happening somewhere else, to other people, at the same time we're literally dying in our beds. | Walter Kirn | ||
| a72c227 | I sensed that almost all of them knew they didn't have much more time on earth. Maybe this accounted for their willingness to pitch in with strangers and form a neighborhood. | Walter Kirn | ||
| 537216d | Other people's devotions embarrassed me, perhaps because, like other people's kisses, they rarely looked genuine when viewed too closely. | Walter Kirn | ||
| a160172 | Their throat muscles shifted sharply when they spoke, as if separately manufacturing each word. | Walter Kirn | ||
| d9ef734 | Reliving his degradation had struck some spark in him and it was glowing now like a blown-on coal. | Walter Kirn | ||
| 9b0f3b9 | I just wasn't ready for his stories. They'd breed with the others I'd heard and hatch new monsters, because there was no such thing as separation here, not once you'd started listening. Never listen. | Walter Kirn | ||
| c86b81c | I preferred that my bad dreams be vague. | Walter Kirn | ||
| c83ce41 | They lived in a blurry world, those two, where clear, consistent intentions weren't required. | Walter Kirn | ||
| 94ff309 | Our habit of wishing backward from what is to what might have been is the soft but persistent tapping that cracks the crystal. | Walter Kirn | ||
| 93c7665 | I'd forgotten this about women: so many conditions. A man shouldn't take them to heart, and yet he does, because he doesn't want to be alone. | Walter Kirn | ||
| aabfdb8 | Men who turn their faith into a business owe all of us a steak dinner now and then. | Walter Kirn | ||
| 6dde416 | Instead of filling in the blanks, I wanted to be blank and be filled in. | books reading | Walter Kirn | |
| c142f98 | You thought you were found but you realize that you were lost, and someday you may discover that you're lost now. | Walter Kirn | ||
| b305571 | endless soaring toy-rocket dreams and schemes that let out a sad, weak 'pop' at their high climax point and then flake apart as they tumble toward some thorn patch that's also a hatching ground for baby snakes | Walter Kirn |