Daily Inspiration Quote by Arthur Koestler

Koestler’s line flatters science and insults it in the same breath. “Peeping toms” aren’t heroic explorers; they’re furtive, marginal figures, spying on something private and larger than them. By hitching that tawdry image to “the keyhole of eternity,” Koestler frames scientific inquiry as an act of illicit looking: hungry, clever, and fundamentally constrained. The cosmos isn’t a grand vista here; it’s a locked room. What scientists get are slivers, not revelations.

The intent isn’t anti-science so much as anti-triumphalism. Koestler, a novelist with a long obsession with ideology and human overreach, keeps reminding readers that method has limits. The keyhole metaphor does double work: it celebrates the discipline of observation (you can learn a lot from a small aperture) while mocking the temptation to mistake a narrow view for the whole scene. Science, in this framing, produces real knowledge, but also a chronic epistemic claustrophobia - always squinting, always extrapolating, always vulnerable to fantasies about what must be happening in the room beyond.

“Eternity” gives the sentence its theological voltage. Koestler isn’t asking scientists to stop looking; he’s suggesting that the object of their gaze carries metaphysical weight that can’t be fully domesticated by measurement. The subtext is a warning to modernity: treat scientific answers as powerful approximations, not priestly certainties. The wit comes from the downgrade - from lab-coated sages to cosmic voyeurs - a sharp reminder that curiosity can be noble and a little ridiculous at once.