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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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Alfred North Whitehead
Age: 86 †
Born: 1861
Born: February 15
Died: 1947
Died: December 30
Mathematician
Philosopher
Physicist
Theologian
Writer
Ramsgate
Kent
Past
Equip
Present
Knowledge
Use

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

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Value is coextensive with reality.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Spoken language is merely a series of squeaks.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.
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Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are cavalry charges in a battle - they are limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.
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Education should turn out the pupil with something he knows well and something he can do well.
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Religion is the reaction of human nature to its search for God.
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The real history does not get written, because it is not in people's brains but in their nerves and vitals.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, seek simplicity and distrust it.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Nature is probably quite indifferent to the aesthetic preferences of mathematicians.
Alfred North Whitehead
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A clash of doctrine is not a disaster, it is an opportunity.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The paradox is now fully established that the utmost abstractions are the true weapons with which to control our thought of concrete fact.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Our habitual experience is a complex of failure and success in the enterprise of interpretation. If we desire a record of uninterpreted experience, we must ask a stone to record its autobiography.
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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.
Alfred North Whitehead
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In a sense, knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows: for details are swallowed up in principles.
Alfred North Whitehead
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It is the business of the future to be dangerous and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The difference between ancients and moderns is that the ancients asked what have we experienced, and moderns asked what can we experience.
Alfred North Whitehead
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...the only simplicity to be trusted is the simplicity to be found on the far side of complexity.
Alfred North Whitehead
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How the past perishes is how the future becomes.
Alfred North Whitehead