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

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

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The fact of the religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience.
Alfred North Whitehead
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It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. This statement is almost a tautology. For the energy of operation of a proposition in an occasion of experience is its interest and is its importance. But of course a true proposition is more apt to be interesting than a false one.
Alfred North Whitehead
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There is a technique, a knack, for thinking, just as there is for doing other things. You are not wholly at the mercy of your thoughts, any more than they are you. They are a machine you can learn to operate.
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.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Without adventure civilization is in full decay.
Alfred North Whitehead
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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.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The factor in human life provocative of a noble discontent is the gradual emergence of a sense of criticism, founded upon appreciation of beauty, and of intellectual distinction, and of duty.
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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In order to acquire learning, we must first shake ourselves free of it.
Alfred North Whitehead
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I regret that it has been necessary for me in this lecture to administer a large dose of four-dimensional geometry. I do not apologize, because I am really not responsible for the fact that nature in its most fundamental aspect is four-dimensional. Things are what they are.
Alfred North Whitehead
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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.
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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To come very near to a true theory, and to grasp its precise application, are two different things, as the history of science teaches us. Everything of importance has been said before by someone who did not discover it.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Without deductive logic science would be entirely useless. It is merely a barren game to ascend from the particular to the general, unless afterwards we can reverse the process and descend from the general to the particular, ascending and descending like angels on Jacob's ladder.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Everyone is a philosopher. Not everyone is good at it.
Alfred North Whitehead
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There is a tradition of opposition between adherents of induction and of deduction. In my view it would be just as sensible for the two ends of a worm to quarrel.
Alfred North Whitehead
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To be an abstraction does not mean that an entity is nothing. It merely means that its existence is only a factor of a more concrete element of nature.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Symbolism is no mere idle fancy or corrupt degeneration: it is inherent in the very texture of human life.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Aristotle discovered all the half-truths which were necessary to the creation of science.
Alfred North Whitehead