Quote

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order. Life refuses to be embalmed alive. The more prolonged the halt in some unrelieved system of order, the greater the crash of the dead society.

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
Art
Preserves
Unrelieved
Order
Refuse
Embalmed
Change
Progress
Prolonged
Life
Dead
Amid
System
Refuses
Alive
Halt
Greater
Crash
Society
Preserve

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

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Vigorous societies harbour a certain extravagance of objectives.
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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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Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science.
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Knowledge keeps no better than fish.
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What the learned world tends to offer is one second-hand scrap of information illustrating ideas derived from another second-hand scrap of information. The second-handedness of the learned world is the secret of its mediocrity.
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But you can catch yourself entertaining habitually certain ideas and setting others aside and that, I think, is where our personal destinies are largely decided.
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There is no greater hindrance to the progress of thought than an attitude of irritated party-spirit.
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Wisdom alone is true ambition's aim, wisdom is the source of virtue and of fame obtained with labour, for mankind employed, and then, when most you share it, best enjoyed.
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Philosophy asks the simple question: What is it all about?
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Common sense is genius in homespun.
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...the only simplicity to be trusted is the simplicity to be found on the far side of complexity.
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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.
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The learned tradition is not concerned with truth, but with the learned adjustment of learned statements of antecedent learned people.
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Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.
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I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning, or destroyed it altogether.
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The great achievements of the past were the adventures of the past. Only the adventurous can understand the greatness of the past.
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The importance of an individual thinker owes something to chance. For it depends upon the fate of his ideas in the minds of his successors.
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Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.
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Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas.
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No religion can be considered in abstraction from its followers, or even from its various types of followers.
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