Courage is never to let your actions be influenced by your fears.
Arthur KoestlerRead
God seems to have left the receiver off the hook and time is running out.
Interpretation
The quote reflects a sense of existential uncertainty and urgency in life, suggesting a disconnect from divine guidance.
Arthur Koestler's quote encapsulates the feeling of abandonment by a higher power and the pressing nature of time. It evokes a sense of disconnection from the divine and emphasizes that we must face our own reality and the ticking clock of life, urging us to consider our actions and decisions before it's too late.
In practice
In a speech about life's urgency, you might say: 'Remember, as Arthur Koestler said, 'God seems to have left the receiver off the hook and time is running out.'
Courage is never to let your actions be influenced by your fears.
History knows no scruples and no hesitation. Inert and unnering flows towards her goal. History knows herway. She makes no mistakes.
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.
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.
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 β of previously unrelated frames of reference or universes of discourse β whose union will solve the previously insoluble problem.
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.
History will see advertising as one of the real evil things of our time. It is stimulating people constantly to want things, want this, want that.
And therefore in geometry (which is the only science that it hath pleased God hitherto to bestow on mankind), men begin at settling the significations of their words; which settling of significations, they call definitions, and place them in the beginning of their reckoning.
There are reveries so deep, reveries which help us descend so deeply within ourselves that they rid us of our history. They liberate us from our name. These solitudes of today return us to the original solitudes.
The body sleeps, the heart sleeps, the mind sleeps - but you remain alert because you are nothing else but alertness. Everything else is a false identification. Awareness is your nature. The body is your abode. The mind is your computer. Awareness;s you, is your very being.
All the daily routine of life, our dressing and undressing, the coming and going from our work or carrying through of its various operations, is utterly without mental reference to pleasure and pain, except under rarely realized conditions.
We had stretched out our arms to each other and supported something in our joined hands, but this thing we were holding was like a sort of gas that exists when you believe in its existence and disappears when you doubt. The task of supporting it seems simple at first glance, but actually requires an ultimate refinement of calculation and a consummate skill.
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