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Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas.

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
Ideas
Reinterpretation
Mathematical
Fundamental
Fundamentals
Basic
Mathematics
Motivation
Progress

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

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Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.
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Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language.
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Nature is probably quite indifferent to the aesthetic preferences of mathematicians.
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Almost all new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.
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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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The tragedy of the world is that those who are imaginative have but slight experience, and those who are experienced have feeble imaginations.
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After you understand about the sun and the stars and the rotation of the earth, you may still miss the radiance of the sunset.
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In its solitariness the spirit asks, What, in the way of value, is the attainment of life? And it can find no such value till it has merged its individual claim with that of the objective universe. Religion is world-loyalty.
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Apart from blunt truth, our lives sink decadently amid the perfume of hints and suggestions.
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If a dog jumps into your lap, it is because he is fond of you but if a cat does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer.
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The physical doctrine of the atom has got into a state which is strongly suggestive of the epicycles of astronomy before Copernicus .
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Every intellectual revolution which has ever stirred humanity into greatness has been a passionate protest against inert ideas. Then, alas, with pathetic ignorance of human psychology, it has proceeded by some educational scheme to bind humanity afresh with inert ideas of its own fashioning.
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In order to acquire learning, we must first shake ourselves free of it.
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We think in generalities, but we live in detail.
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An unflinching determination to take the whole evidence into account is the only method of preservation against the fluctuating extremes of fashionable opinion.
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Heaven knows what seeming nonsense may not tomorrow be demonstrated truth.
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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.
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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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Faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology.
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The antithesis between a technical and a liberal education is fallacious. There can be no adequate technical education which is not liberal, and no liberal education which is not technical.
Alfred North Whitehead