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

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

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With the sense of sight, the idea communicates the emotion, whereas, with sound, the emotion communicates the idea, which is more direct and therefore more powerful.
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There is a tradition of opposition between adherents of induction and of deduction. In my view it would be just as sensible for the two ends of a worm to quarrel.
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It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious.
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I consider Christian theology to be one of the great disasters of the human race.
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We must not expect simple answers to far-reaching questions. However far our gaze penetrates, there are always heights beyond which block our vision.
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Our rate of progress is such that an individual human being, of ordinary length of life, will be called on to face novel situations which find no parallel in his past. The fixed person, for the fixed duties, who, in older societies was such a godsend, in the future will be a public danger.
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Style, in its finest sense, is the last acquirement of the educated mind it is also the most useful. It pervades the whole being.
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Education which is not modern share the fate of all organic things which are kept too long.
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An unflinching determination to take the whole evidence into account is the only method of preservation against the fluctuating extremes of fashionable opinion.
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The foundation of reverence is this perception, that the present holds within itself the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, that whole amplitude of time, which is eternity.
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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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Systems, scientific or philosophic, come and go. Each method of limited understanding is at length exhausted. In its prime each system is a triumphant success: in its decay it is an obstructive nuisance.
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I always feel that I have two duties to perform with a parting guest: one, to see that he doesn't forget anything that is his the other, to see that he doesn't take anything that is mine.
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In order to acquire learning, we must first shake ourselves free of it.
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Scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study.
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A great society is a society in which its men of business think greatly of their functions.
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Each human being is a more complex structure than any social system to which he belongs.
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From the moment of birth we are immersed in action, and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought.
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All practical teachers know that education is a patient process of mastery of details, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day.
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Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas.
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