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When you're average, you're just as close to the bottom as you are the top.
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
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More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead
Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity.
Alfred North Whitehead
There is a technique, a knack, for thinking, just as there is for doing other things. You are not wholly at the mercy of your thoughts, any more than they are you. They are a machine you can learn to operate.
Alfred North Whitehead
Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.
Alfred North Whitehead
Great people plant trees they'll never sit under.
Alfred North Whitehead
Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.
Alfred North Whitehead
As society is now constituted, a literal adherence to the moral precepts scattered throughout the Gospels would mean sudden death.
Alfred North Whitehead
It must be admitted that there is a degree of instability which is inconsistent with civilization. But, on the whole, the great ages have been unstable ages.
Alfred North Whitehead
Rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality.
Alfred North Whitehead
It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.
Alfred North Whitehead
Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness. Thus religion is solitariness and if you are never solitary, you are never religious.
Alfred North Whitehead
Without adventure all civilization is full of decay. Adventure rarely reaches its predetermined end. Columbus never reached China.
Alfred North Whitehead
Through and through the world is infested with quantity: To talk sense is to talk quantities. It is no use saying the nation is large. . . . How large? It is no use saying the radium is scarce. . . . How scarce? You cannot evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music, and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves.
Alfred North Whitehead
Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas.
Alfred North Whitehead
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.
Alfred North Whitehead
Shakespeare wrote better poetry for not knowing too much Milton, I think, knew too much finally for the good of his poetry.
Alfred North Whitehead
People make the mistake of talking about 'natural laws.' There are no natural laws. There are only temporary habits of nature.
Alfred North Whitehead
In all education the main cause of failure is staleness.
Alfred North Whitehead
The chief error in philosophy is overstatement.
Alfred North Whitehead
The factor in human life provocative of a noble discontent is the gradual emergence of a sense of criticism, founded upon appreciation of beauty, and of intellectual distinction, and of duty.
Alfred North Whitehead
The tragedy of the world is that those who are imaginative have but slight experience, and those who are experienced have feeble imaginations.
Alfred North Whitehead
