Courage is never to let your actions be influenced by your fears.
Arthur KoestlerRead
The moment of truth, the sudden emergence of a new insight, is an act of intuition. Such intuitions give the appearance of miraculous flushes, or short-circuits of reasoning. In fact they may be likened to an immersed chain, of which only the beginning and the end are visible above the surface of consciousness. The diver vanishes at one end of the chain and comes up at the other end, guided by invisible links.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Intuitive insights can feel miraculous, appearing suddenly and revealing deeper understanding beneath the surface of our consciousness.
Arthur Koestler's quote emphasizes the nature of intuition as a powerful cognitive process that allows individuals to gain insights unexpectedly. It suggests that these moments of clarity can seem like miraculous leaps in understanding, much like a diver navigating an unseen chain beneath the water, as only a small portion of the thought process is visible to us in our conscious mind.
Themes
IntuitionInsightReasoningUnderstandingConsciousness
In practice
Example use cases
During a motivational speech about creativity.
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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.
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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.
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