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Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

Alfred North Whitehead

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Alfred North Whitehead
Age: 86 †
Born: 1861
Born: February 15
Died: 1947
Died: December 30
Mathematician
Philosopher
Physicist
Theologian
Writer
Ramsgate
Kent
Patterns
Experience
Artist
Aesthetics
Art
Imposing
Pattern
Aesthetic
Enjoyment
Recognition

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

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There is no nature in an instant.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Rationalism is an adventure in the clarification of thought.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Algebra is the intellectual instrument which has been created for rendering clear the quantitative aspects of the world.
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Error itself may be happy chance.
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Our habitual experience is a complex of failure and success in the enterprise of interpretation. If we desire a record of uninterpreted experience, we must ask a stone to record its autobiography.
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I consider Christianity to be one of the great disasters of the human race... It would be impossible to imagine anything more un - Christianlike than theology.
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Vigorous societies harbour a certain extravagance of objectives.
Alfred North Whitehead
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It belongs to the self-respect of intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final unravelment.
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Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it. A merely well informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Religion is what a person does in his solitariness.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The ideas of Freud were popularized by people who only imperfectly understood them, who were incapable of the great effort required to grasp them in their relationship to larger truths, and who therefore assigned to them a prominence out of all proportion to their true importance.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The term many presupposes the term one , and the term one presupposes the term many.
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The preternatural solemnity of a good many of the professionally religious is to me a point against them.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Problems are only opportunities in disquise.
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You cannot evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music, and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves.
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In order to acquire learning, we must first shake ourselves free of it.
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Religion is the reaction of human nature to its search for God.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Religion increasingly is tending to degenerate into a decent formula wherewith to embellish a comfortable life.
Alfred North Whitehead
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I am also greatly indebted to Bergson, William James, and John Dewey. One of my preoccupations has been to rescue their type of thought from the charge of anti-intellectualism, which rightly or wrongly has been associated with it.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Without adventure civilization is in full decay. ... The great fact [is] that in their day the great achievements of the past were the adventures of the past.
Alfred North Whitehead