Quote

The fact of the religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience.

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
History
Misery
Lighting
Experience
Ground
Persistent
Facts
Mass
Occasional
Human
Vision
Expansion
Humans
Religious
Flash
Life
Religion
Optimism
Fact
Enjoyment
Enjoyments
Pain
Apart
Transient

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

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Heaven knows what seeming nonsense may not tomorrow be demonstrated truth.
Alfred North Whitehead
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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.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Vedanta is the most impressive metaphysics the human mind has conceived.
Alfred North Whitehead
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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.
Alfred North Whitehead
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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.
Alfred North Whitehead
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It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science.
Alfred North Whitehead
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No reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the ground of rationality.
Alfred North Whitehead
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When success turns a man's head he faces failure
Alfred North Whitehead
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A great society is a society in which its men of business think greatly of their functions.
Alfred North Whitehead
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It does not matter what men say in words, so long as their activities are controlled by settled instincts. The words may ultimately destroy the instincts but until this has occurred, words do not count.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The teleology of the Universe is directed to the production of Beauty... The type of Truth required for the final stretch of Beauty is a discovery and not a recapitulation... Apart from Beauty, Truth is neither good, nor bad... Truth matters because of beauty.
Alfred North Whitehead
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On the ostensible exactitude of certain branches of human knowledge, including mathematics. The exactness is a fake.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Philosophy is the product of wonder.
Alfred North Whitehead
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People make the mistake of talking about 'natural laws.' There are no natural laws. There are only temporary habits of nature.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The point about zero is that we do not need to use it in the operations of daily life. No one goes out to buy zero fish. It is in a way the most civilised of all the cardinals, and its use is only forced on us by the needs of cultivated modes of thought.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Governments are best classified by considering who are the 'somebodies' they are in fact endeavouring to satisfy.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness. Thus religion is solitariness and if you are never solitary, you are never religious.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The future belongs to those who can rise above the confines of the earth.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The tragedy of the world is that those who are imaginative have but slight experience, and those who are experienced have feeble imaginations.
Alfred North Whitehead