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In the conditions of modern life the rule is absolute, the race which does not value trained intelligence is doomed. Not all your heroism, not all your social charm, not all your wit, not all your victories on land or at sea, can move back the finger of fate. To-day we maintain ourselves. To-morrow science will have moved forward yet one more step, and there will be no appeal from the judgment which will then be pronounced on the uneducated.
-Alfred North Whitehead
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Action(s)
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Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.
-Alfred North Whitehead
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Ideas won't keep, something must be done about them.
-Alfred North Whitehead
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Adventure
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Without adventure civilization is in full decay.
-Alfred North Whitehead
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Analysis, to Analyze
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Familiar things happen, and mankind does not bother about them. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.
-Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World
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Art
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Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.
-Alfred North Whitehead
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Bravery
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True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes. Rather the firm resolve of virtue and reason.
-Alfred North Whitehead
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Change
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The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order. Life refuses to be embalmed alive. The more prolonged the halt in some unrelieved system of order, the greater the crash of the dead society.
-Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality
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Civilization
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The worth of men consists in their liability to persuasion. . . . Civilisation 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 civilisation, either in the general society or in a remnant of individuals. Thus in a live civilisation there is always an element of unrest. For sensitiveness to ideas means curiosity, adventure, change. Civilised order survives on its merits, and is transformed by its power of Recognizing its imperfections.
-Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas
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The vigour of civilised societies is preserved by the widespread sense that high aims are worth while. Vigorous societies harbour a certain extravagance of objectives, so that men wander beyond the safe provision of personal gratifications. All strong interests easily become impersonal, the love of a good job well done. There is a sense of harmony about such an accomplishment, the Peace brought by something worth while. Such personal gratification arises from aim beyond personality.
-Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas
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Common Sense
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Common sense is genius in homespun.
-Alfred North Whitehead
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Conservation
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There are two principles inherent in the very nature of things, recurring in some particular embodiments whatever field we explore - the spirit of change, and the spirit of conservation. There can be nothing real without both. Mere change without conservation is a passage from nothing to nothing. . . . Mere conservation without change cannot conserve. For after all, there is a flux of circumstance, and the freshness of being evaporates under mere repetition.
-Alfred North Whitehead, Science in the Modern World
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Conversation
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Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language.
-Alfred North Whitehead
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Curiosity
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Necessity is the mother of invention is a silly proverb. Necessity is the mother of futile dodges is much closer to the truth. The basis of growth of modern invention is science, and science is almost wholly the outgrowth of pleasurable intellectual curiosity.
-Alfred North Whitehead
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Experience
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An enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words.
-Alfred North Whitehead
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Fate & Destiny
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But you can catch yourself entertaining habitually certain ideas and setting others aside; and that, I think, is where our personal destinies are largely decided.
-Alfred North Whitehead
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Habits
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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
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Ideas
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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.
-Alfred North Whitehead
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Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.
-Alfred North Whitehead
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Intelligence
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Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct form ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.
-Alfred North Whitehead
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International Relations
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Other nations of different habits are not enemies: they are godsends. Men require of their neighbours something sufficiently akin to be understood, something sufficiently different to provoke attention, and something great enough to command admiration. We must not expect, however, all the virtues.
-Alfred North Whitehead, Science in the Modern World
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Life
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Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.
-Alfred North Whitehead
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Nature
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Nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent, the nightingale for its song; and the sun for its radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves and should turn them into odes of self congratulation on the excellence of the human mind.
-Alfred North Whitehead
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Philosophy
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Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning.
-Alfred North Whitehead
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Philosophy is the product of wonder.
-Alfred North Whitehead
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Books by and about Alfred North Whitehead