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The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.

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
Singular
Total
Absence
Bible
Humor
Literature
Things

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

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But harmony is limitation. Thus rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality. Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing.
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The point about zero is that we do not need to use it in the operation of daily life. No one goes out to buy zero fish.
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The English never abolish anything. They put it in cold storage.
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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.
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Youth is life as yet unblemished by much tragedy, but hardly by TV.
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To be an abstraction does not mean that an entity is nothing. It merely means that its existence is only a factor of a more concrete element of nature.
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Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.
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We must produce a great age, or see the collapse of the upward striving of our race.
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But in the prevalent discussion of classes, there are illegitimate transitions to the notions of a 'nexus' and of a 'proposition'. The appeal to a class to perform the services of a proper entity is exactly analogous to an appeal to an imaginary terrier to kill a real rat. Process and Reality
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It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.
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What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like and immorality is what they dislike.
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The ultimate metaphysical ground is the creative advance into novelty.
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Religion is what a man does with his solitariness.
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Through and through the world is infested with quantity: To talk sense is to talk quantities. It is no use saying the nation is large. . . . How large? It is no use saying the radium is scarce. . . . How scarce? 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 a living civilization there is always an element of unrest, for sensitiveness to ideas means curiosity, adventure, change. Civilized order survives on its merits and is transformed by its power of recognizing its imperfections.
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The vigor of civilized societies is preserved by the widespread sense that high aims are worth-while.
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An enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words.
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True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes, but the firm resolve of virtue and reason.
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Identification of rhythm as the casual counterpart of life wherever there is some life, only perceptible to us when the analogies are sufficiently close.
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There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays to the devil.
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