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Apart from blunt truth, our lives sink decadently amid the perfume of hints and suggestions.

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
Truth
Perfume
Life
Sink
Suggestions
Mathematical
Math
Apart
Blunt
Mathematics
Amid
Lives
Hints

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

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A philosopher of imposing stature doesn't think in a vacuum. Even his most abstract ideas are, to some extent, conditioned by what is or is not known in the time when he lives.
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Style, in its finest sense, is the last acquirement of the educated mind it is also the most useful. It pervades the whole being.
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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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Inventive genius requires pleasurable mental activity as a condition for its vigorous exercise
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The chief error in philosophy is overstatement.
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Youth is life as yet unblemished by much tragedy, but hardly by TV.
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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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The teleology of the Universe is directed to the production of Beauty... The type of Truth required for the final stretch of Beauty is a discovery and not a recapitulation... Apart from Beauty, Truth is neither good, nor bad... Truth matters because of beauty.
Alfred North Whitehead
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There are no whole truths: All truths are half-truths.
Alfred North Whitehead
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You cannot evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music, and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Nature, even in the act of satisfying anticipation, often provides a surprise.
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Learning is often spoken of as if we are watching the open pages of all the books which we have ever read, and then, when occasion arises, we select the right page to read aloud to the universe.
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What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like and immorality is what they dislike.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The foundation of reverence is this perception, that the present holds within itself the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, that whole amplitude of time, which is eternity.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions.
Alfred North Whitehead
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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.
Alfred North Whitehead
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But harmony is limitation. Thus rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality. Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The mentality of mankind and the language of mankind created each other. If we like to assume the rise of language as a given fact, then it is not going too far to say that the souls of men are the gift from language to mankind. The account of the sixth day should be written: He gave them speech, and they became souls.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The consequences of a plethora of half-digested theoretical knowledge are deplorable.
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No man of science wants merely to know. He acquires knowledge to appease his passion for discovery. He does not discover in order to know, he knows in order to discover.
Alfred North Whitehead