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Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.

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
Stupidity
Ignorance
Knowledge
Death
Political

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

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Vigorous societies harbour a certain extravagance of objectives.
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Seek simplicity, and distrust it.
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Science repudiates philosophy. In other words, it has never cared to justify its truth or explain its meaning.
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The main importance of Francis Bacon's influence does not lie in any peculiar theory of inductive reasoning which he happened to express, but in the revolt against second-hand information of which he was a leader.
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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.
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One main factor in the upward trend of animal life has been the power of wandering.
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A Unitarian is a person who believes in at most one God.
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Great people plant trees they'll never sit under.
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The purpose of education is not to fill a vessel but to kindle a flame.
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The learned tradition is not concerned with truth, but with the learned adjustment of learned statements of antecedent learned people.
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Error itself may be happy chance.
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Peace is self-control at its widest-at the width where the self has been lost, and interest has been transferred to coordinations wider than personality.
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In this modern world, the celibacy of the medieval learned class has been replaced by a celibacy of the intellect which is divorced from the concrete contemplation of the complete facts.
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No science can be more secure than the unconscious metaphysics which tacitly it presupposes.
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Order is not sufficient. What is required, is something much more complex. It is order entering upon novelty so that the massiveness of order does not degenerate into mere repetition and so that the novelty is always reflected upon a background of system.
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You cannot evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music, and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves.
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Seek simplicity, then distrust.
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The mentality of mankind and the language of mankind created each other. If we like to assume the rise of language as a given fact, then it is not going too far to say that the souls of men are the gift from language to mankind. The account of the sixth day should be written: He gave them speech, and they became souls.
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We think in generalities, but we live in detail.
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There is a tradition of opposition between adherents of induction and of deduction. In my view it would be just as sensible for the two ends of a worm to quarrel.
Alfred North Whitehead