The Act of Creation QUOTES

1 " 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 , The Act of Creation

2 " Language can become a screen which stands between the thinker and reality. This is the reason why true creativity often starts where language ends. "

― Arthur Koestler , The Act of Creation

3 " The metre of the poet, the metronome of the musician, the centimetre of the mathematician, are all derived from the same root, metron: measure, measurement. "

― Arthur Koestler , The Act of Creation

4 " The comic effect of the satire is derived from the simultaneous presence, in the reader's mind, of the social reality with which he is familiar, and of its reflections in the distorting mirror of the satirist. It focuses attention on abuses and deformities in society of which, blunted by habit, we were no longer aware; it makes us suddenly discover the absurdity of the familiar and the familiarity of the absurd. "

― Arthur Koestler , The Act of Creation

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

― Arthur Koestler , The Act of Creation

6 " 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 , The Act of Creation

7 " Saints and mystics spend their lives trying to escape the prison of the flesh; "

― Arthur Koestler , The Act of Creation

8 " 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; he 'sees with equal eye, as God of all, / A hero perish or a sparrow fall'. The scientist's attitude is basically similar in situations where he suddenly discovers the connection between a banal event and a general law of nature - Newton's apple or the boiling kettle of James Watt. "

― Arthur Koestler , The Act of Creation

9 " 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 the aspirant had to achieve by abstinences and examinations of conscience. Pythagoras himself, like St. Francis, is said to have preached to animals; the whole surviving tradition indicates that his disciples, while engaged in number-lore and astronomical calculations, firmly believed that a true scientist must be a saint, and that the wish to become one was the motivation of his labours. "

― Arthur Koestler , The Act of Creation

10 " 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-handed' molecules to the right; life substances are thus 'optically active'. Why this should be so we still do not quite know; but it remains a challenging fact that 'no other chemical characteristic is as distinctive of living organisms as is optical activity'. "

― Arthur Koestler , The Act of Creation

11 " 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 , The Act of Creation

12 " 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 , The Act of Creation

13 " Complexity of thought is no measure of originality. "

― Arthur Koestler , The Act of Creation

14 " 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 cause of electric and magnetic phenomena. "

― Arthur Koestler , The Act of Creation

15 " The sex-drive in the Freudian system is essentially something to be disposed of -through the proper channels or by sublimation; pleasure is derived not from its pursuit, but from getting rid of it. "

― Arthur Koestler , The Act of Creation

16 " 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 , The Act of Creation

17 " 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 creative act, by connecting previously unrelated dimensions of experience, enables him to attain to a higher level of mental evolution. It is an act of liberation-the defeat of habit by originality. "

― Arthur Koestler , The Act of Creation

18 " 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 before the motor neurons of the reflex arc are connected with the sensory neurons. This centrifugal mode of development means that the individual acts on its environment before it reacts to its environment. "

― Arthur Koestler , The Act of Creation

19 " We have seen how laughter is sparked off by the collision of matrices; discovery, by their integration; aesthetic experience by their juxtaposition. Snobbery follows neither of these patterns; it is a hotchpotch of matrices, the application of the rules of one game to another game. It uses a clock to measure weight, and a thermometer to to measure distance. The creative mind perceives things in a new light, the snob in a borrowed light; his pursuits are sterile, and his satisfactions of a vicarious nature. He does not aim at power; he merely wants to rub shoulders with those who wield power, and bask in their reflected glory. He would rather be a tolerated hanger-on of an envied set than a popular member of one to which by nature he belongs. What he admires in public would bore him when alone, but he is unaware of it. When he reads Kirkegaard, he is not moved by what he reads, he is moved by himself reading Kirkegaard-but he is blissfully unaware of it. His emotions do not derive from the object, but from extraneous sources associated with it; his satisfactions are pseudo-satisfactions, his triumphs self-delusions. He has never travelled in the belly of the whale; he has opted for the comforts of sterility against the pangs of creativity. "

― Arthur Koestler , The Act of Creation

20 " Whatever the nature of organizing relations may be,' J. Needham wrote in 1932, 'they form the central problem of biology, and biology will be fruitful in the future only if this is recognized. The hierarchy of relations, from the molecular structure of carbon compounds to the equilibrium of species and ecological wholes, will perhaps be the leading idea of the future. "

― Arthur Koestler , The Act of Creation