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Symbolism is no mere idle fancy or corrupt degeneration: it is inherent in the very texture of human life.

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
Corrupt
Idle
Inherent
Fancy
Mere
Human
Degeneration
Humans
Symbolism
Life
Texture

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

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Vigorous societies harbor a certain extravagance of objectives, so that men wander beyond the safe provision of personal gratifications.
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The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.
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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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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.
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The chief error in philosophy is overstatement.
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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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It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious.
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A man really writes for an audience of about ten persons. Of course if others like it, that is clear gain. But if those ten are satisfied, he is content.
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In modern times the belief that the ultimate explanation of all things was to be found in Newtonian mechanics was an adumbration of the truth that all science, as it grows towards perfection, becomes mathematical in its ideas.
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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.
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Every intellectual revolution which has ever stirred humanity into greatness has been a passionate protest against inert ideas. Then, alas, with pathetic ignorance of human psychology, it has proceeded by some educational scheme to bind humanity afresh with inert ideas of its own fashioning.
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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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Vedanta is the most impressive metaphysics the human mind has conceived.
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Life is the enjoyment of emotion, derived from the past and aimed at the future.
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Other nations of different habits are not enemies: they are godsends. Men require of their neighbours something sufficiently akin to be understood, something sufficiently different to provoke attention, and something great enough to command admiration. We must not expect, however, all the virtues.
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Inventive genius requires pleasurable mental activity as a condition for its vigorous exercise
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An enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words.
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The mentality of mankind and the language of mankind created each other. If we like to assume the rise of language as a given fact, then it is not going too far to say that the souls of men are the gift from language to mankind. The account of the sixth day should be written: He gave them speech, and they became souls.
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Whenever a text-book is written of real educational worth, you may be quite certain that some reviewer will say that it will be difficult to teach from it. Of course it will be difficult to teach from it. It it were easy, the book ought to be burned.
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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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