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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
Time
Brainstorming
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Generalities
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More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead
I am also greatly indebted to Bergson, William James, and John Dewey. One of my preoccupations has been to rescue their type of thought from the charge of anti-intellectualism, which rightly or wrongly has been associated with it.
Alfred North Whitehead
The preternatural solemnity of a good many of the professionally religious is to me a point against them.
Alfred North Whitehead
Great people plant trees they'll never sit under.
Alfred North Whitehead
Imagination is not to be divorced from the facts. It is a way of illuminating the facts.
Alfred North Whitehead
Great dreamers' dreams are never fulfilled, they are always transcended.
Alfred North Whitehead
Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.
Alfred North Whitehead
The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature throughout the centuries is the notion of 'independent existence.' There is no such mode of existence every entity is to be understood in terms of the way it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.
Alfred North Whitehead
...the self-satisfied dogmatism with which mankind at each period of its history cherishes the delusion of the finality of existing modes of knowledge.
Alfred North Whitehead
True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes, but the firm resolve of virtue and reason.
Alfred North Whitehead
The point about zero is that we do not need to use it in the operations of daily life. No one goes out to buy zero fish. It is in a way the most civilised of all the cardinals, and its use is only forced on us by the needs of cultivated modes of thought.
Alfred North Whitehead
In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory.
Alfred North Whitehead
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
Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions.
Alfred North Whitehead
The consequences of a plethora of half-digested theoretical knowledge are deplorable.
Alfred North Whitehead
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.
Alfred North Whitehead
Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas.
Alfred North Whitehead
...the only simplicity to be trusted is the simplicity to be found on the far side of complexity.
Alfred North Whitehead
Now in creative thought common sense is a bad master. Its sole criterion for judgement is that the new ideas shall look like the old ones. In other words it can only work by suppressing originality.
Alfred North Whitehead
Vigorous societies harbor a certain extravagance of objectives, so that men wander beyond the safe provision of personal gratifications.
Alfred North Whitehead
Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.
Alfred North Whitehead
