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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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There is no more common error than to assume that, because prolonged and accurate mathematical calculations have been made, the application of the result to some fact of nature is absolutely certain.
Alfred North Whitehead
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I consider Christian theology to be one of the great disasters of the human race.
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When you're average, you're just as close to the bottom as you are the top.
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Algebra reverses the relative importance of the factors in ordinary language.
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Education which is not modern share the fate of all organic things which are kept too long.
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No reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the ground of rationality.
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Religion is what a man does with his solitariness.
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The defense of morals is the battle-cry which best rallies stupidity against change.
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Without adventure civilization is in full decay.
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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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The theme of Cosmology, which is the basis of all religions, is the story of the dynamic effort of the World passing into everlasting unity, and of the static majesty of God's vision, accomplishing its purpose of completion by absorption of the World's multiplicity of effort.
Alfred North Whitehead
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No science can be more secure than the unconscious metaphysics which tacitly it presupposes.
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I regret that it has been necessary for me in this lecture to administer a large dose of four-dimensional geometry. I do not apologize, because I am really not responsible for the fact that nature in its most fundamental aspect is four-dimensional. Things are what they are.
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The importance of an individual thinker owes something to chance. For it depends upon the fate of his ideas in the minds of his successors.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Wisdom alone is true ambition's aim, wisdom is the source of virtue and of fame obtained with labour, for mankind employed, and then, when most you share it, best enjoyed.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The physical doctrine of the atom has got into a state which is strongly suggestive of the epicycles of astronomy before Copernicus .
Alfred North Whitehead
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The power of Christianity lies in its revelation in act, of that which Plato divined in theory.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Other nations of different habits are not enemies: they are godsends. Men require of their neighbours something sufficiently akin to be understood, something sufficiently different to provoke attention, and something great enough to command admiration. We must not expect, however, all the virtues.
Alfred North Whitehead
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War can protect it cannot create.
Alfred North Whitehead