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I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning, or destroyed it altogether.

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
Mine
Altogether
Meaning
Suffered
Deal
Context
Deals
Sentence
Either
Sentences
Incongruous
Quite
Destroyed
Juxtaposition
Matter
Mines
Quoted
Great
Writers
Distorted

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

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There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays to the devil.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Education which is not modern share the fate of all organic things which are kept too long.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Religion is what a person does in his solitariness.
Alfred North Whitehead
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[In many circumstances,] the most important thing about a proposition is not that it be true, but that it be interesting.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Our rate of progress is such that an individual human being, of ordinary length of life, will be called on to face novel situations which find no parallel in his past. The fixed person, for the fixed duties, who, in older societies was such a godsend, in the future will be a public danger.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Each human being is a more complex structure than any social system to which he belongs.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Order is not sufficient. What is required, is something much more complex. It is order entering upon novelty so that the massiveness of order does not degenerate into mere repetition and so that the novelty is always reflected upon a background of system.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The task of a university is the creation of the future, so far as rational thought and civilized modes of appreciation can affect the issue.
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 vastest knowledge of today cannot transcend the buddhi of the Rishis in ancient India and science in its most advanced stage now is closer to Vedanta than ever before.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The physical doctrine of the atom has got into a state which is strongly suggestive of the epicycles of astronomy before Copernicus .
Alfred North Whitehead
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True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes, but the firm resolve of virtue and reason.
Alfred North Whitehead
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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.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Science repudiates philosophy. In other words, it has never cared to justify its truth or explain its meaning.
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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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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Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it. A merely well informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth.
Alfred North Whitehead
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An unflinching determination to take the whole evidence into account is the only method of preservation against the fluctuating extremes of fashionable opinion.
Alfred North Whitehead