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Now in creative thought common sense is a bad master. Its sole criterion for judgement is that the new ideas shall look like the old ones. In other words it can only work by suppressing originality.
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
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More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead
Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.
Alfred North Whitehead
Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.
Alfred North Whitehead
The learned tradition is not concerned with truth, but with the learned adjustment of learned statements of antecedent learned people.
Alfred North Whitehead
The justification for a university is that it preserves the connection between knowledge and the zest of life, by uniting the young and the old in the imaginative consideration of learning.
Alfred North Whitehead
A man of science doesn't discover in order to know, he wants to know in order to discover.
Alfred North Whitehead
The 'silly question' is the first intimation of some totally novel development.
Alfred North Whitehead
The tragedy of the world is that those who are imaginative have but slight experience, and those who are experienced have feeble imaginations.
Alfred North Whitehead
[In many circumstances,] the most important thing about a proposition is not that it be true, but that it be interesting.
Alfred North Whitehead
I consider Christian theology to be one of the great disasters of the human race.
Alfred North Whitehead
A race preserves its vigor so long as it harbors a real contrast between what has been and what may be and so long as it is nerved by the vigor to adventure beyond the safeties of the past. Without adventure civilization is in full decay.
Alfred North Whitehead
Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity.
Alfred North Whitehead
The paradox is now fully established that the utmost abstractions are the true weapons with which to control our thought of concrete fact.
Alfred North Whitehead
The real history does not get written, because it is not in people's brains but in their nerves and vitals.
Alfred North Whitehead
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
Religion is what a man does with his solitariness.
Alfred North Whitehead
The merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth.
Alfred North Whitehead
The science of pure mathematics, in its modern developments, may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit.
Alfred North Whitehead
A culture is in its finest flower before it begins to analyze itself.
Alfred North Whitehead
Knowledge is always accompanied with accessories of emotion and purpose.
Alfred North Whitehead
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
