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

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

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The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order. Life refuses to be embalmed alive. The more prolonged the halt in some unrelieved system of order, the greater the crash of the dead society.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanation of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be ``Seek simplicity and distrust it.''
Alfred North Whitehead
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I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning, or destroyed it altogether.
Alfred North Whitehead
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There is a quality of life which lies always beyond the mere fact of life and when we include the quality in the fact, there is still omitted the quality of the quality.
Alfred North Whitehead
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To see what is general in what is particular, and what is permanent in what is transitory, is the aim of scientific thought.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Every organism requires an environment of friends, partly to shield it from violent changes, and partly to supply it with its wants.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Without adventure all civilization is full of decay. Adventure rarely reaches its predetermined end. Columbus never reached China.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.
Alfred North Whitehead
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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.
Alfred North Whitehead
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As society is now constituted, a literal adherence to the moral precepts scattered throughout the Gospels would mean sudden death.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Every epoch has its character determined by the way its population reacts to the material events which they encounter.
Alfred North Whitehead
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No man of science wants merely to know. He acquires knowledge to appease his passion for discovery. He does not discover in order to know, he knows in order to discover.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Learning is often spoken of as if we are watching the open pages of all the books which we have ever read, and then, when occasion arises, we select the right page to read aloud to the universe.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The 'silly question' is the first intimation of some totally novel development.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Imagination is not to be divorced from the facts. It is a way of illuminating the facts.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Mathematics as a science, commenced when first someone, probably a Greek, proved propositions about any things or about some things, without specifications of definite particular things.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Each generation criticizes the unconscious assumptions made by its parent. It may assent to them, but it brings them out in the open.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Above all things we must be aware of what I will call 'inert ideas' - that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilized, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations.
Alfred North Whitehead
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We think in generalities, but we live in detail. To make the past live, we must perceive it in detail in addition to thinking of it in generalities.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Learning preserves the errors of the past as well as its wisdom.
Alfred North Whitehead