Alfred North Whitehead - Adventures of ideas (1933)

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Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.

Alfred North Whitehead
A great society is a society in which its men of business think greatly of their functions.

Alfred North Whitehead
In every age of well-marked transition, there is the pattern of habitual dumb practice and emotion which is passing and there is oncoming a new complex of habit.

Alfred North Whitehead
The world is shocked, or amused, by the sight of saintly old people hindering in the name of morality the removal of obvious brutalities from a legal system.

Alfred North Whitehead
Positivistic science is solely concerned with observed fact, and must hazard no conjecture as to the future. If observed fact be all we know, then there is no other knowledge. Probability is relative to knowledge. There is no probability as to the future within the doctrine of Positivism.

Alfred North Whitehead
Art heightens the sense of humanity. It gives an elation to feeling which is supernatural...A million sunsets will not spur us on towards civilization. It requires Art to evoke into consciousness the finite perfections which lie ready for human achievement.

Alfred North Whitehead
Adventure is essential, namely, the search for new perfection.

Alfred North Whitehead
Experiment is nothing else than a mode of cooking the facts for the sake of exemplifying the law.

Alfred North Whitehead
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.

Alfred North Whitehead
Governments are best classified by considering who are the "somebodies" they are in fact endeavoring to satisfy.

Alfred North Whitehead
There is no greater hindrance to the progress of thought than an attitude of irritated party-spirit.

Alfred North Whitehead
No religion can be considered in abstraction from its followers, or even from its various types of followers.

Alfred North Whitehead
Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions.

Alfred North Whitehead
Peace is self-control at its widest-at the width where the "self" has been lost, and interest has been transferred to coordinations wider than personality.

Alfred North Whitehead
The difference between ancients and moderns is that the ancients asked what have we experienced, and moderns asked what can we experience.

Alfred North Whitehead
Vigorous societies harbour a certain extravagance of objectives.

Alfred North Whitehead
When he [God] said Let there be light, then there was light and not a mere imitation or statistical average.

Alfred North Whitehead
It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. This statement is almost a tautology. For the energy of operation of a proposition in an occasion of experience is its interest, and is its importance. But of course a true proposition is more apt to be interesting than a false one.

Alfred North Whitehead
The human body is an instrument for the production of art in the life of the human soul.

Alfred North Whitehead
The deliberate aim at Peace very easily passes into its bastard substitute, Anesthesia.

Alfred North Whitehead
A general definition of civilization: a civilized society is one exhibiting the five qualities of truth, beauty, adventure, art, peace.

Alfred North Whitehead
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.

Alfred North Whitehead
As society is now constituted, a literal adherence to the moral precepts scattered throughout the gospels would mean sudden death.

Alfred North Whitehead
Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.

Alfred North Whitehead
The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.

Alfred North Whitehead
In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as if it were a mist, cloaking the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reasoning grasps at straws for premises and float on gossamer for deductions.

Alfred North Whitehead
Every epoch has its character determined by the way its population reacts to the material events which they encounter.

Alfred North Whitehead
Nature, even in the act of satisfying anticipation, often provides a surprise.

Alfred North Whitehead
Apart from blunt truth, our lives sink decadently amid the perfume of hints and suggestions.

Alfred North Whitehead
Civilizations can only be understood by those who are civilized.

Alfred North Whitehead