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We think in generalities, but we live in detail.

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
Think
Generalities
Thinking
Detail
Educational
Details
Religion
Inspirational
Live
Time
Brainstorming

More quotes by 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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There is a tradition of opposition between adherents of induction and of deduction. In my view it would be just as sensible for the two ends of a worm to quarrel.
Alfred North Whitehead
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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.
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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Imagination is not to be divorced from the facts. It is a way of illuminating the facts.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Every intellectual revolution which has ever stirred humanity into greatness has been a passionate protest against inert ideas. Then, alas, with pathetic ignorance of human psychology, it has proceeded by some educational scheme to bind humanity afresh with inert ideas of its own fashioning.
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.
Alfred North Whitehead
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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.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The great achievements of the past were the adventures of the past. Only the adventurous can understand the greatness of the past.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, seek simplicity and distrust it.
Alfred North Whitehead
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One main factor in the upward trend of animal life has been the power of wandering.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Error itself may be happy chance.
Alfred North Whitehead
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As society is now constituted, a literal adherence to the moral precepts scattered throughout the Gospels would mean sudden death.
Alfred North Whitehead
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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.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The ideas of Freud were popularized by people who only imperfectly understood them, who were incapable of the great effort required to grasp them in their relationship to larger truths, and who therefore assigned to them a prominence out of all proportion to their true importance.
Alfred North Whitehead
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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.
Alfred North Whitehead
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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.
Alfred North Whitehead
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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.
Alfred North Whitehead
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No Roman ever died in contemplation over a geometrical diagram.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Above all things we must be aware of what I will call 'inert ideas' - that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilized, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations.
Alfred North Whitehead