Quote

One and one make two assumes that the changes in the shift of circumstance are unimportant. But it is impossible for us to analyze this notion of unimportant change.

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
Change
Math
Make
Assuming
Assumes
Mathematics
Analyze
Notion
Unimportant
Changes
Circumstance
Circumstances
Shift
Impossible
Assumption
Two
Mathematical

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Without adventure civilization is in full decay. ... The great fact [is] that in their day the great achievements of the past were the adventures of the past.
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Each generation criticizes the unconscious assumptions made by its parent. It may assent to them, but it brings them out in the open.
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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.
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The race that does not value trained intelligence is doomed.
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Every really new idea looks crazy at first.
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I am sure that one secret of a successful teacher is that he has formulated quite clearly in his mind what the pupil has got to know in precise fashion. He will then cease from half-hearted attempts to worry his pupils with memorizing a lot of irrelevant stuff of inferior importance.
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Imagination is not to be divorced from the facts. It is a way of illuminating the facts.
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The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.
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Mathematics as a science, commenced when first someone, probably a Greek, proved propositions about any things or about some things, without specifications of definite particular things.
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In every age of well-marked transition, there is the pattern of habitual dumb practice and emotion which is passing and there is oncoming a new complex of habit.
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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.
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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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Everyone is a philosopher. Not everyone is good at it.
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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.
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There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays to the devil.
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Speak out in acts the time for words has passed, and only deeds will suffice.
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Apart from God every activity is merely a passing whiff of insignificance.
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On the ostensible exactitude of certain branches of human knowledge, including mathematics. The exactness is a fake.
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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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So far as the mere imparting of information is concerned, no university has had any justification for existence since the popularization of printing in the fifteenth century.
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