Literary Birthday – 5 September – Arthur Koestler

Arthur Koestler was born on 5 September 1905 and died on 1 March 1983.

Arthur Koestler Quotes

1. Creative activity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.
2. The evolution of the brain not only overshot the needs of prehistoric man, it is the only example of evolution providing a species with an organ which it does not know how to use.
3. Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion.
4. The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.
5. Brain-washing starts in the cradle.
6. The individual is not a killer, but the group is, and by identifying with it the individual is transformed into a killer.
7. 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.
8. A publisher who writes is like a cow in a milk bar.
9. True creativity often starts where language ends.
10. History had a slow pulse; man counted in years, history in generations.

Arthur Koestler was a Hungarian-British author and journalist. Koestler’s Darkness at Noon gained him international fame. He went on to write novels, memoirs, biographies, and numerous essays. Koestler published the memoirs Arrow in the Blue and The Invisible Writing. Much of Arthur Koestler’s work was funded and distributed secretly by a covert propaganda wing of the UK Foreign Office, known as the Information Research Department (IRD). In 1972, he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

Source for Image: Eric Koch for Anefo, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Arthur_Koestler_(1969).jpg

by Amanda Patterson
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