Arthur Koestler Quotes

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.

When all else fails there's always delusion.

Denial of death at some point becomes a delusion.

The neurotic's strongest fantasy is that he has no fantasies. The real is very real to him, the unreal even more so.

The best any human can do is to pick a delusion that helps him get through the day

It is only that my illusion is more real to me than reality. And so do we often build our world on an error, and cry out that the universe is falling to pieces, if any one but lift a finger to replace the error by truth.

If you are an idealist, it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn't real anyway.

Illusion is sometimes all that keeps us sane." - Anita

Where ideas are real and reality is shadow.

If you can delude yourself by believing that there is some kind of Santa Claus out there who is going to bail you out in the end, then it will help you get through. Even if you are proven wrong in the end, you would have had a better life than a non-believer.

Sanity ... had it ever been more than a convention -- a comfortable set of blinkers, an agreed mode of wishful thinking, which excluded from our view the full strangeness and malevolence of the universe we are compelled to inhabit?

The psychotic does not merely think he sees four blue bivalves with floppy wings wandering up the wall; he does see them. An hallucination is not, strictly speaking, manufactured in the brain; it is received by the brain, like any 'real' sense datum, and the patient act in response to this to-him-very-real perception of reality in as logical a way as we do to our sense data. In any way to suppose he only 'thinks he sees it' is to misunderstand totally the experience of psychosis.

Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible.

Neither idealists nor materialists are right; we must take both idea and expression.

The thing is too that when you sell people a false reality and they take that to be the norm, when that false reality is light-years from what’s really happening, that in itself is a tremendous defense mechanism because when you start talking about what is actually happening, it is so different from what people perceive to be happening. They just can’t make that jump; it’s too insane for them.

If you make things too real, sometimes you bring it down to the mundane.

The camera has its own kind of consciousness; in the lens the Garden of Eden itself would become ever so slightly too perfect.

Isn't it sad how some people's grip on their lives is so precarious that they'll embrace any preposterous delusion rather than face an occasional bleak truth?

...regrettable as it may seem to the idealist, the experience of history provides little warrant for the belief that real progress, and the freedom that makes progress possible, lies in unification. For where unification has been able to establish unity of ideas it has usually ended in uniformity, paralysing the growth of new ideas. And where the unification has merely brought about an artificial or imposed unity, its irksomeness has led through discord to disruption.

Funny how people don't really see each other. Men and women. They invent each other in their minds and then they see what they invent.They don't really see each other. Now she was in love with him and she didn't even know his real name, didn't know anything real about him.

[Plato] was the first to envisage the idea of timeless existence and to emphasize it-against reason-as a reality, more [real] than our actual experience.

If on the other hand he went to pay his respects to The Door and it wasn't there . . . what then? The answer, of course, was very simple. He had a whole board of circuits for dealing with exactly this problem, in fact this was the very heart of his function. He would continue to believe in it whatever the facts turned out to be, what else was the meaning of Belief? The Door would still be there, even if the Door was not.

Drugs and alcohol are not my problem, reality is my problem, drugs and alcohol are my solution.

Only a Californian would have observed that it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell the real fake from the fake fake.

I use beauty as a way of helping people to receive difficult or upsetting ideas. The topical issues are merely a vehicle for making one aware of one's own perceptual shift-which is the real thrill.