Skip to content

If conquerors be regarded as the engine-drivers of History, then the conquerors of thought are perhaps the pointsmen who, less conspicuous to the traveller's eye, determine the direction of the journey.

— Arthur Koestler The Sleepwalkeers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe (1959)

Another quote →

Topics

Science

More quotes by Arthur Koestler

Einstein's space is no closer to reality than Van Gogh's sky.

The Act of Creation (1964)

Men cannot be treated as units in operations of political arithmetic because they behave like the symbols for zero and the infinite, which dislocate all mathematical operations.

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

The Act of Creation (1964)

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

Drinkers of Infinity: Essays 1955-1967 (1967)

Coincidence may be described as the chance encounter of two unrelated causal chains which — miraculously, it seems — merge into a significant event.

All Arthur Koestler quotes →

You may also like

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

H. P. Lovecraft The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.

Albert Einstein Moral Decay (1937)

Science and religion are two human enterprises sharing many features.

Freeman Dyson Infinite in All Directions (1988)

To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.

Henri Poincaré Science and Hypothesis (1901)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Arthur Koestler (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.