Courage is never to let your actions be influenced by your fears.
Arthur KoestlerRead
Habit is the denial of creativity and the negation of freedom; a self-imposed straitjacket of which the wearer is unaware.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Habits can restrict our creativity and freedom, often without us realizing it.
In this quote, Arthur Koestler emphasizes the idea that forming habits can inadvertently limit our creative potential and personal freedom. He suggests that these habits act like a straitjacket, constraining our ability to think and act freely, and often we remain oblivious to this restriction while we go about our daily lives.
Themes
HabitCreativityFreedomSelf-ImposedStraitjacket
In practice
Example use cases
Using this quote in a motivational speech about breaking old habits to unleash creativity.
More from Arthur Koestler
All quotes →History knows no scruples and no hesitation. Inert and unnering flows towards her goal. History knows herway. She makes no mistakes.
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If one looks with a cold eye at the mess man has made of his history, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that he has been afflicted by some built-in mental disorder which drives him towards self-destruction. Murder within the species on an individual or collective scale is a phenomenon unknown in the whole animal kingdom, except for man, and a few varieties of ants and rats.
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Space-ships and time machines are no escape from the human condition. Let Othello subject Desdemona to a lie-detector test; his jealousy will still blind him to the evidence. Let Oedipus triumph over gravity; he won't triumph over his fate.
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The real achievement in discoveries... is seeing an analogy where no one saw one before... The essence of discovery is that unlikely marriage of cabbages and kings — of previously unrelated frames of reference or universes of discourse — whose union will solve the previously insoluble problem.
Arthur KoestlerRead
In my youth I regarded the universe as an open book, printed in the language of equations, whereas now it appears to me as a text written in invisible ink, of which in our rare moments of grace we are able to decipher a small segment.
Arthur KoestlerRead
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