"Each human being is a more complex structure than any social system to which he belongs."
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Alfred North Whitehead quotes (page 9 of 17)
326 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"No science can be more secure than the unconscious metaphysics which tacitly it presupposes."
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"It belongs to the self-respect of intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final unravelment."
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"Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within, the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realised; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest."
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"Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness. Thus religion is solitariness; and if you are never solitary, you are never religious."
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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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"The worth of men consists in their liability to persuasion. They can persuade and can be persuaded by the disclosure of alternatives, the better and the worse. Civilization is the maintenance of social order, by its own inherent persuasiveness as embodying the nobler alternative. The recourse to force, however, unavoidable, is a disclosure of the failure of civilization, either in the general society or in a remnant of individuals. Thus in a live civilization there is always an element of unrest."
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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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"Apart from blunt truth, our lives sink decadently amid the perfume of hints and suggestions."
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"You cannot evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music, and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves."
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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 vigor of civilized societies is preserved by the widespread sense that high aims are worth-while."
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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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"Religion is what a man does with his solitariness."
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"Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilisation of knowledge."
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"Rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality."
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"The ideas of Freud were popularized by people who only imperfectly understood them, who were incapable of the great effort required to grasp them in their relationship to larger truths, and who therefore assigned to them a prominence out of all proportion to their true importance."
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"Vigorous societies harbor a certain extravagance of objectives, so that men wander beyond the safe provision of personal gratifications."
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"There is no nature in an instant."
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"Vigorous societies harbour a certain extravagance of objectives."
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