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

Alfred North Whitehead

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Alfred North Whitehead
Age: 86 †
Born: 1861
Born: February 15
Died: 1947
Died: December 30
Mathematician
Philosopher
Physicist
Theologian
Writer
Ramsgate
Kent
Number
Numbers
Technology
Truism
Without
Extending
Important
Advances
Thinking
Operations
Perform
Civilization

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

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I am sure that one secret of a successful teacher is that he has formulated quite clearly in his mind what the pupil has got to know in precise fashion. He will then cease from half-hearted attempts to worry his pupils with memorizing a lot of irrelevant stuff of inferior importance.
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In a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world
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It is the business of the future to be dangerous.
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Our habitual experience is a complex of failure and success in the enterprise of interpretation. If we desire a record of uninterpreted experience, we must ask a stone to record its autobiography.
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The merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Mathematics as a science, commenced when first someone, probably a Greek, proved propositions about any things or about some things, without specifications of definite particular things.
Alfred North Whitehead
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What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like and immorality is what they dislike.
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Philosophy is the product of wonder.
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Nobody has a right to speak more clearly than he thinks.
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In modern times the belief that the ultimate explanation of all things was to be found in Newtonian mechanics was an adumbration of the truth that all science, as it grows towards perfection, becomes mathematical in its ideas.
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The difference between ancients and moderns is that the ancients asked what have we experienced, and moderns asked what can we experience.
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The whole of mathematics consists in the organization of a series of aids to the imagination in the process of reasoning.
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In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory.
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One and one make two assumes that the changes in the shift of circumstance are unimportant. But it is impossible for us to analyze this notion of unimportant change.
Alfred North Whitehead
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No man of science wants merely to know. He acquires knowledge to appease his passion for discovery. He does not discover in order to know, he knows in order to discover.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.
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Knowledge keeps no better than fish.
Alfred North Whitehead
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No religion can be considered in abstraction from its followers, or even from its various types of followers.
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Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Ninety percent of our lives is governed by emotion. Our brains merely register and act upon what is telegraphed to them by our bodily experience. Intellect is to emotion as our clothes are to our bodies we could not very well have civilized life without clothes, but we would be in a poor way if we had only clothes without bodies.
Alfred North Whitehead