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An enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words.

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
Mature
Enormous
Words
Experience
Cannot
Part
Expressed

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

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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.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Disputing the commonsense notion that all events require the prior existence of some underlying matter or substance. There is no antecedent static cabinet.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The progress of Science consists in observing interconnections and in showing with a patient ingenuity that the events of this ever-shifting world are but examples of a few general relations, called laws. 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
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Aristotle discovered all the half-truths which were necessary to the creation of science.
Alfred North Whitehead
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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.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth.
Alfred North Whitehead
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In this modern world, the celibacy of the medieval learned class has been replaced by a celibacy of the intellect which is divorced from the concrete contemplation of the complete facts.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.
Alfred North Whitehead
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No man of science wants merely to know. He acquires knowledge to appease his passion for discovery. He does not discover in order to know, he knows in order to discover.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment... We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this great science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it.
Alfred North Whitehead
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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.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment.
Alfred North Whitehead
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To be an abstraction does not mean that an entity is nothing. It merely means that its existence is only a factor of a more concrete element of nature.
Alfred North Whitehead
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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
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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.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanation of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be ``Seek simplicity and distrust it.''
Alfred North Whitehead
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Knowledge is always accompanied with accessories of emotion and purpose.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Seek simplicity, and distrust it.
Alfred North Whitehead