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Seek simplicity, and distrust it.

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
Distrust
Mathematical
Simplicity
Seek
Creativity
Science

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

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To come very near to a true theory, and to grasp its precise application, are two different things, as the history of science teaches us. Everything of importance has been said before by someone who did not discover it.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Shakespeare wrote better poetry for not knowing too much Milton, I think, knew too much finally for the good of his poetry.
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What we perceive as the present is the vivid fringe of memory tinged with anticipation.
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Ninety percent of our lives is governed by emotion. Our brains merely register and act upon what is telegraphed to them by our bodily experience. Intellect is to emotion as our clothes are to our bodies we could not very well have civilized life without clothes, but we would be in a poor way if we had only clothes without bodies.
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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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A science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost.
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The fixed person for the fixed duties who in older societies was such a godsend, in future will be a public danger.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.
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Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.
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We must produce a great age, or see the collapse of the upward striving of our race.
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Human nature loses its most precious quality when it is robbed of its sense of things beyond, unexplored and yet insistent.
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War can protect it cannot create.
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No science can be more secure than the unconscious metaphysics which tacitly it presupposes.
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Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.
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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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The result of teaching small parts of a large number of subjects is the passive reception of disconnected ideas, not illumed with any spark of vitality.
Alfred North Whitehead
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...the only simplicity to be trusted is the simplicity to be found on the far side of complexity.
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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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