Quote

A race preserves its vigor so long as it harbors a real contrast between what has been and what may be and so long as it is nerved by the vigor to adventure beyond the safeties of the past. Without adventure civilization is in full decay.

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
Race
Decay
Action
Contrast
Past
Preserves
May
Safety
Without
Adventure
Real
Civilization
Nerved
Long
Beyond
Harbors
Full
Vigor

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

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Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas.
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The human body is an instrument for the production of art in the life of the human soul.
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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.
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A clash of doctrine is not a disaster, it is an opportunity.
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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.
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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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Youth is life as yet unblemished by much tragedy, but hardly by TV.
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I am sure that one secret of a successful teacher is that he has formulated quite clearly in his mind what the pupil has got to know in precise fashion. He will then cease from half-hearted attempts to worry his pupils with memorizing a lot of irrelevant stuff of inferior importance.
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In order to acquire learning, we must first shake ourselves free of it.
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Without deductive logic science would be entirely useless. It is merely a barren game to ascend from the particular to the general, unless afterwards we can reverse the process and descend from the general to the particular, ascending and descending like angels on Jacob's ladder.
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Philosophy is the product of wonder.
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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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It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.
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Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct form ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.
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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.
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Governments are best classified by considering who are the 'somebodies' they are in fact endeavouring to satisfy.
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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.
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On the ostensible exactitude of certain branches of human knowledge, including mathematics. The exactness is a fake.
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To see what is general in what is particular, and what is permanent in what is transitory, is the aim of scientific thought.
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Order is not sufficient. What is required, is something much more complex. It is order entering upon novelty so that the massiveness of order does not degenerate into mere repetition and so that the novelty is always reflected upon a background of system.
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