Carsten Riedel > Carsten's Quotes

“The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature throughout the centuries is the notion of 'independent existence.' There is no such mode of existence; every entity is to be understood in terms of the way it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.”
― Alfred North Whitehead

“Religion carries two sorts of people in two entirely opposite directions: the mild and gentle people it carries towards mercy and justice; the persecuting people it carries into fiendish sadistic cruelty. Mind you, though this may seem to justify the eighteenth-century Age of Reason in its contention that religion is nothing but an organized, gigantic fraud and a curse to the human race, nothing could be farther from the truth. It possesses these two aspects, the evil one of the two appealing to people capable of naïve hatred; but what is actually happening is that when you get natures stirred to their depths over questions which they feel to be overwhelmingly vital, you get the bad stirred up in them as well as the good; the mud as well as the water. It doesn't seem to matter much which sect you have, for both types occur in all sects....”
― Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead

“Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.”
― Alfred North Whitehead

“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them. ”
― Alfred North Whitehead

“It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.”
― Alfred North Whitehead

“Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance is the death of knowledge.”
― Alfred North Whitehead

“The purpose of thinking is to let the ideas die instead of us dying.”
― Alfred North Whitehead

“Error is the price we pay for progress.”
― Alfred North Whitehead