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Error is the price we pay for progress.

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
Price
Pay
Progress
Error
Errors

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

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Mathematics, in its widest significance, is the development of all types of formal, necessary, deductive reasoning.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them.
Alfred North Whitehead
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In every age of well-marked transition, there is the pattern of habitual dumb practice and emotion which is passing and there is oncoming a new complex of habit.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The race that does not value trained intelligence is doomed.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Religion is what a person does in his solitariness.
Alfred North Whitehead
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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.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Youth is life as yet unblemished by much tragedy, but hardly by TV.
Alfred North Whitehead
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In modern times the belief that the ultimate explanation of all things was to be found in Newtonian mechanics was an adumbration of the truth that all science, as it grows towards perfection, becomes mathematical in its ideas.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are cavalry charges in a battle - they are limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Style, in its finest sense, is the last acquirement of the educated mind it is also the most useful. It pervades the whole being.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Every organism requires an environment of friends, partly to shield it from violent changes, and partly to supply it with its wants.
Alfred North Whitehead
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But harmony is limitation. Thus rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality. Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing.
Alfred North Whitehead
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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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No religion can be considered in abstraction from its followers, or even from its various types of followers.
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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Learning preserves the errors of the past as well as its wisdom.
Alfred North Whitehead
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When success turns a man's head he faces failure
Alfred North Whitehead
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Vigorous societies harbour a certain extravagance of objectives.
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.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Without deductive logic science would be entirely useless. It is merely a barren game to ascend from the particular to the general, unless afterwards we can reverse the process and descend from the general to the particular, ascending and descending like angels on Jacob's ladder.
Alfred North Whitehead