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In every age of well-marked transition, there is the pattern of habitual dumb practice and emotion which is passing and there is oncoming a new complex of habit.

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
Every
Passing
Marked
Habit
Pattern
Emotion
Passings
Practice
Transition
Age
Complexes
Change
Complex
Wells
Dumb
Oncoming
Well
Patterns
Habitual

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It is natural to think that an abstract science cannot be of much importance in affairs of human life, because it has omitted from its consideration everything of real interest.
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What the learned world tends to offer is one second-hand scrap of information illustrating ideas derived from another second-hand scrap of information. The second-handedness of the learned world is the secret of its mediocrity.
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In its solitariness the spirit asks, What, in the way of value, is the attainment of life? And it can find no such value till it has merged its individual claim with that of the objective universe. Religion is world-loyalty.
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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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Almost all new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.
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In a sense, knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows: for details are swallowed up in principles.
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The many become one and are increased by one.
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Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness.
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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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No science can be more secure than the unconscious metaphysics which tacitly it presupposes.
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It is not paradox to say that in our most theoretical moods we may be nearest to our most practical applications.
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But you can catch yourself entertaining habitually certain ideas and setting others aside and that, I think, is where our personal destinies are largely decided.
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Without deductive logic science would be entirely useless. It is merely a barren game to ascend from the particular to the general, unless afterwards we can reverse the process and descend from the general to the particular, ascending and descending like angels on Jacob's ladder.
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If you have had your attention directed to the novelties in thought in your own lifetime, you will have observed that almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced, and almost any idea which jogs you out of your current abstractions may be better than nothing.
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No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it.
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The absolute pacifist is a bad citizen times come when force must be used to uphold right, justice and ideals.
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Nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent, the nightingale for its song and the sun for its radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves and should turn them into odes of self congratulation on the excellence of the human mind.
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How the past perishes is how the future becomes.
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An open mind is all very well in its way, but it ought not to be so open that there is no keeping anything in or out of it.
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God is in the world, or nowhere, creating continually in us and around us. Insofar as man partakes of this creative process does he partake of the divine, of God, and that participation is his immortality.
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