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

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

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Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity.
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Intolerance is the besetting sin of moral fervour.
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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.
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A Unitarian is a person who believes in at most one God.
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So far as the mere imparting of information is concerned, no university has had any justification for existence since the popularization of printing in the fifteenth century.
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The teleology of the Universe is directed to the production of Beauty... The type of Truth required for the final stretch of Beauty is a discovery and not a recapitulation... Apart from Beauty, Truth is neither good, nor bad... Truth matters because of beauty.
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From the moment of birth we are immersed in action, and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought.
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Thus the negative perception is the triumph of consciousness.
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How the past perishes is how the future becomes.
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The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.
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Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.
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In a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world
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The chief danger to philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence.
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The only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present. The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground for it is the past, and it is the future.
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The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.
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There is a tradition of opposition between adherents of induction and of deduction. In my view it would be just as sensible for the two ends of a worm to quarrel.
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Art heightens the sense of humanity. It gives an elation to feeling which is supernatural...A million sunsets will not spur us on towards civilization. It requires Art to evoke into consciousness the finite perfections which lie ready for human achievement.
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The world is shocked, or amused, by the sight of saintly old people hindering in the name of morality the removal of obvious brutalities from a legal system.
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A philosopher of imposing stature doesn't think in a vacuum. Even his most abstract ideas are, to some extent, conditioned by what is or is not known in the time when he lives.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Knowledge keeps no better than fish.
Alfred North Whitehead