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Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure, a sense of nothing having been done before, of complete freedom to experiment.

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
Art
Nothing
Flourishes
Done
Experiment
Experiments
Complete
Adventure
Freedom
Sense

More quotes by 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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One main factor in the upward trend of animal life has been the power of wandering.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.
Alfred North Whitehead
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When success turns a man's head he faces failure
Alfred North Whitehead
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Vedanta is the most impressive metaphysics the human mind has conceived.
Alfred North Whitehead
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I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning, or destroyed it altogether.
Alfred North Whitehead
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It is a safe rule to apply that, when a mathematical or philosophical author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense.
Alfred North Whitehead
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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.
Alfred North Whitehead
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A Unitarian is a person who believes in at most one God.
Alfred North Whitehead
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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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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 in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression.
Alfred North Whitehead
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A man of science doesn't discover in order to know, he wants to know in order to discover.
Alfred North Whitehead
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I am also greatly indebted to Bergson, William James, and John Dewey. One of my preoccupations has been to rescue their type of thought from the charge of anti-intellectualism, which rightly or wrongly has been associated with it.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The absolute pacifist is a bad citizen times come when force must be used to uphold right, justice and ideals.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent, the nightingale for its song and the sun for its radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves and should turn them into odes of self congratulation on the excellence of the human mind.
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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Every organism requires an environment of friends, partly to shield it from violent changes, and partly to supply it with its wants.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The progress of Science consists in observing interconnections and in showing with a patient ingenuity that the events of this ever-shifting world are but examples of a few general relations, called laws. To see what is general in what is particular, and what is permanent in what is transitory, is the aim of scientific thought.
Alfred North Whitehead