Quote

The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation.

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
Science
Flight
Rendered
Makes
Rational
Lands
True
Discovery
Imaginative
Like
Method
Airplane
Aeroplane
Ground
Thin
Acute
Air
Interpretation
Generalization
Particular
Observation
Aeroplanes
Land
Starts
Renewed

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

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Knowledge does not keep any better than fish.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The fact of the religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience.
Alfred North Whitehead
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An unflinching determination to take the whole evidence into account is the only method of preservation against the fluctuating extremes of fashionable opinion.
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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The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.
Alfred North Whitehead
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All practical teachers know that education is a patient process of mastery of details, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Whenever a text-book is written of real educational worth, you may be quite certain that some reviewer will say that it will be difficult to teach from it. Of course it will be difficult to teach from it. It it were easy, the book ought to be burned.
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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Our rate of progress is such that an individual human being, of ordinary length of life, will be called on to face novel situations which find no parallel in his past. The fixed person, for the fixed duties, who, in older societies was such a godsend, in the future will be a public danger.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Knowledge is always accompanied with accessories of emotion and purpose.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Philosophy is the product of wonder.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Seek simplicity but distrust it.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The only use of knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Almost all new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.
Alfred North Whitehead
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On the ostensible exactitude of certain branches of human knowledge, including mathematics. The exactness is a fake.
Alfred North Whitehead
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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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Error itself may be happy chance.
Alfred North Whitehead