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The aims of scientific thought are to see the general in the particular and the eternal in the transitory.

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
General
Eternal
Particular
Science
Transitory
Thought
Aims
Aim
Scientific

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

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There is a technique, a knack, for thinking, just as there is for doing other things. You are not wholly at the mercy of your thoughts, any more than they are you. They are a machine you can learn to operate.
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The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.
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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.
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Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions.
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The preternatural solemnity of a good many of the professionally religious is to me a point against them.
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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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The justification for a university is that it preserves the connection between knowledge and the zest of life, by uniting the young and the old in the imaginative consideration of learning.
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Nobody has a right to speak more clearly than he thinks.
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Rationalism is an adventure in the clarification of thought.
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Seek simplicity but distrust it.
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Heaven knows what seeming nonsense may not tomorrow be demonstrated truth.
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The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanation of complex facts... Seek simplicity and distrust it.
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There is a quality of life which lies always beyond the mere fact of life and when we include the quality in the fact, there is still omitted the quality of the quality.
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A man really writes for an audience of about ten persons. Of course if others like it, that is clear gain. But if those ten are satisfied, he is content.
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When success turns a man's head he faces failure
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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.
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Religion is what a person does in his solitariness.
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Without doubt, if we are to go back to that ultimate, integral experience, unwarped by the sophistications of theory, that experience whose elucidation is the final aim of philosophy, the flux of things is one ultimate generalization around which we must weave our philosophical system.
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A great society is a society in which its men of business think greatly of their functions.
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The pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit.
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