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

— Alfred North Whitehead Adventures of Ideas (1933)

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Beauty

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

In all philosophic theory there is an ultimate which is actual in virtue of its accidents.

Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)

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

Adventures of Ideas (1933)

No reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the ground of all rationality.

Science and the Modern World (1925)

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

Adventures of Ideas (1933)

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

An Introduction to Mathematics (1911)

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Beautiful objects are wrought by study through effort, but ugly things are reaped automatically without toil.

Democritus Freeman (1948)

True beauty dwells in deep retreats,
Whose veil is unremoved
Till heart with heart in concord beats,
And the lover is beloved.

William Wordsworth

The great artists are the ones who dare to entitle to beauty things so natural that when they're seen afterward, people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?

André Gide The Immoralist (1902)

Beauty itself doth of itself persuade
The eyes of men without an orator.

William Shakespeare The Rape of Lucrece (1594)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Alfred North Whitehead (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.