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The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

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
Consists
European
Philosophical
Series
Tradition
Characterization
General
Footnotes
Europe
Safest
Knowledge
Plato

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Style, in its finest sense, is the last acquirement of the educated mind it is also the most useful. It pervades the whole being.
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Do not teach too many subjects and what you teach, teach thoroughly.
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Shakespeare wrote better poetry for not knowing too much Milton, I think, knew too much finally for the good of his poetry.
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Civilizations can only be understood by those who are civilized.
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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.
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If a dog jumps into your lap, it is because he is fond of you but if a cat does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer.
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Art heightens the sense of humanity. It gives an elation to feeling which is supernatural...A million sunsets will not spur us on towards civilization. It requires Art to evoke into consciousness the finite perfections which lie ready for human achievement.
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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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Faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology.
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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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The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order. Life refuses to be embalmed alive. The more prolonged the halt in some unrelieved system of order, the greater the crash of the dead society.
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You think the world is what it looks like in fine weather at noon day I think it is what it seems like in the early morning when one first wakes from deep sleep.
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The justification for a university is that it preserves the connection between knowledge and the zest of life, by uniting the young and the old in the imaginative consideration of learning.
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Ninety percent of our lives is governed by emotion.
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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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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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The fact of the religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience.
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The defense of morals is the battle-cry which best rallies stupidity against change.
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There is only one subject matter for education, and that is Life in all its manifestations
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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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