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The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.

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
Total
Absence
Bible
Humor
Literature
Things
Singular

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

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What the learned world tends to offer is one second-hand scrap of information illustrating ideas derived from another second-hand scrap of information. The second-handedness of the learned world is the secret of its mediocrity.
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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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Philosophy is the product of wonder. The effort after the general characterization of the world around us is the romance of human thought.
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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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The merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth.
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It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.
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The preternatural solemnity of a good many of the professionally religious is to me a point against them.
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Vigorous societies harbor a certain extravagance of objectives, so that men wander beyond the safe provision of personal gratifications.
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Thus the negative perception is the triumph of consciousness.
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With the sense of sight, the idea communicates the emotion, whereas, with sound, the emotion communicates the idea, which is more direct and therefore more powerful.
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Peace is self-control at its widest-at the width where the self has been lost, and interest has been transferred to coordinations wider than personality.
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No science can be more secure than the unconscious metaphysics which tacitly it presupposes.
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The way in which the persecution of Galileo has been remembered is a tribute to the quiet commencement of the most intimate change in outlook which the human race had yet encountered. Since a babe was born in a manger, it may be doubted whether so great a thing has happened with so little stir
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In order to acquire learning, we must first shake ourselves free of it.
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Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas.
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The power of Christianity lies in its revelation in act, of that which Plato divined in theory.
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The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.
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Great people plant trees they'll never sit under.
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Mathematics, in its widest significance, is the development of all types of formal, necessary, deductive reasoning.
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Philosophy is the product of wonder.
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