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There are no whole truths: All truths are half-truths.

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
Half
Truth
Whole
Truths
Lying

More quotes by 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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Value is coextensive with reality.
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The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanation of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be ``Seek simplicity and distrust it.''
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Apart from God every activity is merely a passing whiff of insignificance.
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The worship of God is not a rule of safety - it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The vigor of civilized societies is preserved by the widespread sense that high aims are worth-while.
Alfred North Whitehead
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We must produce a great age, or see the collapse of the upward striving of our race.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Now in creative thought common sense is a bad master. Its sole criterion for judgement is that the new ideas shall look like the old ones. In other words it can only work by suppressing originality.
Alfred North Whitehead
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A science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Governments are best classified by considering who are the 'somebodies' they are in fact endeavouring to satisfy.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The foundations of the world are to be found, not in the cognitive experience of conscious thought, but in the aesthetic experience of everyday life.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The tragedy of the world is that those who are imaginative have but slight experience, and those who are experienced have feeble imaginations.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The defense of morals is the battle-cry which best rallies stupidity against change.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The way in which the persecution of Galileo has been remembered is a tribute to the quiet commencement of the most intimate change in outlook which the human race had yet encountered. Since a babe was born in a manger, it may be doubted whether so great a thing has happened with so little stir
Alfred North Whitehead
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Without adventure all civilization is full of decay. Adventure rarely reaches its predetermined end. Columbus never reached China.
Alfred North Whitehead
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It belongs to the self-respect of intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final unravelment.
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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To be an abstraction does not mean that an entity is nothing. It merely means that its existence is only a factor of a more concrete element of nature.
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