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The whole of mathematics consists in the organization of a series of aids to the imagination in the process of reasoning.

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
Math
Mathematics
Series
Organization
Imagination
Process
Reasoning
Whole
Consists
Aids

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The chief danger to philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence.
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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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The only use of knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present.
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There is no more common error than to assume that, because prolonged and accurate mathematical calculations have been made, the application of the result to some fact of nature is absolutely certain.
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You think the world is what it looks like in fine weather at noon day I think it is what it seems like in the early morning when one first wakes from deep sleep.
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Systems, scientific or philosophic, come and go. Each method of limited understanding is at length exhausted. In its prime each system is a triumphant success: in its decay it is an obstructive nuisance.
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Some of the finest moral intuitions come to quite humble people. The visiting of lofty ideas doesn't depend on formal schooling.
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It is impossible to meditate on time and the mystery of nature without an overwhelming emotion at the limitations of human intelligence.
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It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.
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No science can be more secure than the unconscious metaphysics which tacitly it presupposes.
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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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A clash of doctrine is not a disaster, it is an opportunity.
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The motive of success is not enough.
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The consequences of a plethora of half-digested theoretical knowledge are deplorable.
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There is only one subject matter for education, and that is Life in all its manifestations
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The result of teaching small parts of a large number of subjects is the passive reception of disconnected ideas, not illumed with any spark of vitality.
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We must not expect simple answers to far-reaching questions. However far our gaze penetrates, there are always heights beyond which block our vision.
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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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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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