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Heaven knows what seeming nonsense may not tomorrow be demonstrated truth.

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
Nonsense
Tomorrow
Heaven
Lying
Truth
May
Demonstrated
Seeming

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

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It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The foundation of reverence is this perception, that the present holds within itself the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, that whole amplitude of time, which is eternity.
Alfred North Whitehead
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When success turns a man's head he faces failure
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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In a sense, knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows: for details are swallowed up in principles.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Algebra reverses the relative importance of the factors in ordinary language.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Our habitual experience is a complex of failure and success in the enterprise of interpretation. If we desire a record of uninterpreted experience, we must ask a stone to record its autobiography.
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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I would be a billionaire if I was looking to be a selfish boss. That's not me.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The progress of Science consists in observing interconnections and in showing with a patient ingenuity that the events of this ever-shifting world are but examples of a few general relations, called laws. 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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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
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I put forward as a general definition of civilization, that a civilized society is exhibiting the five qualities of Truth, Beauty, Adventure, Art, Peace.
Alfred North Whitehead
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One main factor in the upward trend of animal life has been the power of wandering.
Alfred North Whitehead
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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.
Alfred North Whitehead
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When you're average, you're just as close to the bottom as you are the top.
Alfred North Whitehead
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You cannot evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music, and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The real history does not get written, because it is not in people's brains but in their nerves and vitals.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Great people plant trees they'll never sit under.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study.
Alfred North Whitehead