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We find in the history of ideas mutations which do not seem to correspond to any obvious need, and at first sight appear as mere playful whimsies — such as Apollonius' work on conic sections, or the non-Euclidean geometries, whose practical value became apparent only later.

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

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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.

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