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It does not matter what men say in words, so long as their activities are controlled by settled instincts. The words may ultimately destroy the instincts but until this has occurred, words do not count.
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
Matter
Ultimately
Long
Destroy
Men
Instinct
Settled
Speech
Occurred
Activity
Instincts
Words
Activities
Doe
Controlled
May
Count
More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead
Intolerance is the besetting sin of moral fervour.
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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.
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The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.
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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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The fixed person for the fixed duties who in older societies was such a godsend, in future will be a public danger.
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There is a quality of life which lies always beyond the mere fact of life and when we include the quality in the fact, there is still omitted the quality of the quality.
Alfred North Whitehead
Through and through the world is infested with quantity: To talk sense is to talk quantities. It is no use saying the nation is large. . . . How large? It is no use saying the radium is scarce. . . . How scarce? You cannot evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music, and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves.
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Seek simplicity, then distrust.
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We think in generalities, but we live in detail.
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A Unitarian is a person who believes in at most one God.
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It is this union of passionate interest in the detailed facts with equal devotion to abstract generalisation which forms the novelty in our present society .
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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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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.
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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
Peace is self-control at its widest-at the width where the self has been lost, and interest has been transferred to coordinations wider than personality.
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The only justification in the use of force is to reduce the amount of force necessary to be used.
Alfred North Whitehead
The ideas of Freud were popularized by people who only imperfectly understood them, who were incapable of the great effort required to grasp them in their relationship to larger truths, and who therefore assigned to them a prominence out of all proportion to their true importance.
Alfred North Whitehead
Nobody has a right to speak more clearly than he thinks.
Alfred North Whitehead
The English never abolish anything. They put it in cold storage.
Alfred North Whitehead
Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.
Alfred North Whitehead
