Alfred North Whitehead Life Quotations

Symbolism is no mere idle fancy or corrupt degeneration: it is inherent in the very texture of human life.

The essence of Christianity is the appeal to the life of Christ as a revelation of the nature of God and of God's agency in the world. The record is fragmentary, inconsistent, and uncertain. . . . But there can be no doubt as to what elements in the record have evoked a response from all that is best in human nature. The Mother, the Child, and the bare manger: the lowly man, homeless and self-forgetful, with his message of peace, love, and sympathy: the suffering, the agony, the tender words as life ebbed, the final despair: and the whole with the authority of supreme victory.

Ninety percent of our lives is governed by emotion.

Religion increasingly is tending to degenerate into a decent formula wherewith to embellish a comfortable life.

Life is the enjoyment of emotion, derived from the past and aimed at the future.

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.

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

Religion is what a person does in his solitariness.

Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of life is to grasp as much as we can out of that infinitude.

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