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The vigor of civilized societies is preserved by the widespread sense that high aims are worth-while.

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
High
Widespread
Sense
Preserved
Vigor
Aims
Societies
Civilized
Aim
Worth
Civilised

More quotes by 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.
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Imagination is not to be divorced from the facts. It is a way of illuminating the facts.
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The great achievements of the past were the adventures of the past. Only the adventurous can understand the greatness of the past.
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Routine is the god of every social system it is the seventh heaven of business, the essential component in the success of every factory, the ideal of every statesman. The social machine should run like clockwork.
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The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.
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Without adventure civilization is in full decay. ... The great fact [is] that in their day the great achievements of the past were the adventures of the past.
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Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.
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A Unitarian is a person who believes in at most one God.
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A man of science doesn't discover in order to know, he wants to know in order to discover.
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Each human being is a more complex structure than any social system to which he belongs.
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The oneness of the universe, and the oneness of each element of the universe, repeat themselves to the crack of doom in the creative advance from creature to creature, each creature including in itself the whole of history and exemplifying the self-identity of things and their mutual diversities.
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It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.
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Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience.
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No religion can be considered in abstraction from its followers, or even from its various types of followers.
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The race that does not value trained intelligence is doomed.
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The chief danger to philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence.
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The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervor, live for it, and if need be, die for it.
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The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature throughout the centuries is the notion of 'independent existence.' There is no such mode of existence every entity is to be understood in terms of the way it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.
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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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The only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present. The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground for it is the past, and it is the future.
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