/lit/ - Literature

Gonna post some quotes from Whitehead's Adventures of Ideas for the thread

"We notice that a great idea in the background of dim consciousness is like a phantom ocean beating upon the shores of human life in successive waves of specialization" (pg. 19, "The Human Soul")

"The folly of intelligent people, clear-headed and narrow-visioned, has precipitated many catastrophes" (pg. 48, "Aspects of Freedom")

"The creativity of the world is the throbbing emotion of the past hurling itself into a new transcendent fact" (pg. 177, "Objects and Subjects")

"Thus it belongs to the essence of each occasion of experience that it is concerned with an otherness transcending itself" (pg. 180, "Objects and Subjects")

"It is not a mere question of having a soul or of not having a soul. The question is, How much, if any?" (pg. 208, "The Grouping of Occasions")

"To know the truth partially is to distort the Universe. For example, the savage who can only count to ten enormously exaggerates the importance of the small numbers, and so do we whose imaginations fail when we come to millions" (pg. 243, "Truth")

"Music elicits some confused feeling into direct apprehension. It performs this service, or disservice, by introducing an emotional clothing which changes the dim objective reality into a clear Appearance matching the subjective form provided for its prehension" (pg. 249, "Truth")

"Progress is founded upon the experience of discordant feelings. The social value of liberty lies in its production of discords. There are perfections beyond perfections. All realization is finite, and there is no perfection which is the infinitude of all perfections. Perfections of diverse types are among themselves discordant. Thus the contribution to Beauty which can be supplied by Discord -- in itself destructive and evil -- is the positive feeling a quick shift aim from the tameness of outworn perfection to some other ideal with its freshness still upon it. Thus the value of Discord is a tribute to the merits of imperfection." (pg. 257, "Beauty")

"The human body is an instrument for the production of art in the life of the human soul" (pg. 271, "Truth and Beauty")

"One principle is that the very essence of real actuality -- that is, of the completely real -- isprocess. Thus each actual thing is only to be understood in terms of its becoming and perishing. There is no halt in which the actuality is just itself, accidentally played upon by qualifications derived from the shift of circumstances. The converse is the truth." (pg. 274-275, "Adventure")