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Quotes from Adventures of Ideas — Alfred North Whitehead

1861–1947 England

← All quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

10 quotes

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

Adventures of Ideas (1933)

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

Adventures of Ideas (1933)

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

Adventures of Ideas (1933)

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

Adventures of Ideas (1933)

Intolerance is the besetting sin of moral fervour.

Adventures of Ideas (1933)

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

Adventures of Ideas (1933)

Systems, scientific and philosophic, come and go. Each method of limited understanding is at length exhausted. In its prime each system is a triumphant success: in its decay it is an obstructive nuisance.

Adventures of Ideas (1933)

A race preserves its vigour so long as it harbours a real contrast between what has been and what may be, and so long as it is nerved by the vigour to adventure beyond the safeties of the past. Without adventure, civilization is in full decay.

Adventures of Ideas (1933)

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 floats on gossamer for deductions.

Adventures of Ideas (1933)

The point is that in the past the time-span of important change was considerably longer than that of a single human life. Thus mankind was trained to adapt itself to fixed conditions.
To-day the time-span is considerably shorter than that of human life, and accordingly our training must prepare individuals to face a novelty of conditions.

Adventures of Ideas (1933)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Alfred North Whitehead (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.