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Art is the imposing of a pattern on 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
Imposing
Pattern
Aesthetic
Enjoyment
Recognition
Patterns
Experience
Art

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

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Without doubt, if we are to go back to that ultimate, integral experience, unwarped by the sophistications of theory, that experience whose elucidation is the final aim of philosophy, the flux of things is one ultimate generalization around which we must weave our philosophical system.
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The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention.
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The foundations of the world are to be found, not in the cognitive experience of conscious thought, but in the aesthetic experience of everyday life.
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No Roman ever died in contemplation over a geometrical diagram.
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The consequences of a plethora of half-digested theoretical knowledge are deplorable.
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The fixed person for the fixed duties who in older societies was such a godsend, in future will be a public danger.
Alfred North Whitehead
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I have always noticed that deeply and truly religious persons are fond of a joke, and I am suspicious of those who aren't.
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The preternatural solemnity of a good many of the professionally religious is to me a point against them.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The paradox is now fully established that the utmost abstractions are the true weapons with which to control our thought of concrete fact.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Human nature loses its most precious quality when it is robbed of its sense of things beyond, unexplored and yet insistent.
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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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Religion is the reaction of human nature to its search for God.
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Religion is what a man does with his solitariness.
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The aims of scientific thought are to see the general in the particular and the eternal in the transitory.
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The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment.
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Order is not sufficient. What is required, is something much more complex. It is order entering upon novelty so that the massiveness of order does not degenerate into mere repetition and so that the novelty is always reflected upon a background of system.
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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.
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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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Vedanta is the most impressive metaphysics the human mind has conceived.
Alfred North Whitehead
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I consider Christianity to be one of the great disasters of the human race... It would be impossible to imagine anything more un - Christianlike than theology.
Alfred North Whitehead