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Seek simplicity but distrust it.

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
Seek
Distrust
Simplicity

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

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People make the mistake of talking about 'natural laws.' There are no natural laws. There are only temporary habits of nature.
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Ninety percent of our lives is governed by emotion.
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Without adventure civilization is in full decay.
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One main factor in the upward trend of animal life has been the power of wandering.
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I have always noticed that deeply and truly religious persons are fond of a joke, and I am suspicious of those who aren't.
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Error is the price we pay for progress.
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It is impossible to meditate on time and the mystery of nature without an overwhelming emotion at the limitations of human intelligence.
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The absolute pacifist is a bad citizen times come when force must be used to uphold right, justice and ideals.
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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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The paradox is now fully established that the utmost abstractions are the true weapons with which to control our thought of concrete fact.
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An open mind is all very well in its way, but it ought not to be so open that there is no keeping anything in or out of it.
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I consider Christianity to be one of the great disasters of the human race... It would be impossible to imagine anything more un - Christianlike than theology.
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It is a safe rule to apply that, when a mathematical or philosophical author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense.
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Mathematics, in its widest significance, is the development of all types of formal, necessary, deductive reasoning.
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It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. This statement is almost a tautology. For the energy of operation of a proposition in an occasion of experience is its interest and is its importance. But of course a true proposition is more apt to be interesting than a false one.
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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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Apart from God every activity is merely a passing whiff of insignificance.
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Error itself may be happy chance.
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Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure, a sense of nothing having been done before, of complete freedom to experiment.
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To see what is general in what is particular, and what is permanent in what is transitory, is the aim of scientific thought.
Alfred North Whitehead