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Vigorous societies harbour a certain extravagance of objectives.

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
Objectives
Certain
Harbour
Civilised
Extravagance
Vigorous
Societies

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

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Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.
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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 mentality of mankind and the language of mankind created each other. If we like to assume the rise of language as a given fact, then it is not going too far to say that the souls of men are the gift from language to mankind. The account of the sixth day should be written: He gave them speech, and they became souls.
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It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious.
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Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.
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Great people plant trees they'll never sit under.
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What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like and immorality is what they dislike.
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The factor in human life provocative of a noble discontent is the gradual emergence of a sense of criticism, founded upon appreciation of beauty, and of intellectual distinction, and of duty.
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When you're average, you're just as close to the bottom as you are the top.
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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.
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The only use of knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present.
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Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness.
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Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity.
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The result of teaching small parts of a large number of subjects is the passive reception of disconnected ideas, not illumed with any spark of vitality.
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The real history does not get written, because it is not in people's brains but in their nerves and vitals.
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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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So far as the mere imparting of information is concerned, no university has had any justification for existence since the popularization of printing in the fifteenth century.
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In modern times the belief that the ultimate explanation of all things was to be found in Newtonian mechanics was an adumbration of the truth that all science, as it grows towards perfection, becomes mathematical in its ideas.
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Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.
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The worship of God is not a rule of safety - it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable.
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