Quote

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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Alfred North Whitehead
Age: 86 †
Born: 1861
Born: February 15
Died: 1947
Died: December 30
Mathematician
Philosopher
Physicist
Theologian
Writer
Ramsgate
Kent
Merely
Elements
Existence
Abstraction
Means
Factor
Nature
Entity
Doe
Concrete
Nothing
Element
Mean
Factors

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

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The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment.
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There is only one subject matter for education, and that is Life in all its manifestations
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True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes, but the firm resolve of virtue and reason.
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Education which is not modern share the fate of all organic things which are kept too long.
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It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.
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The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, seek simplicity and distrust it.
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Value is coextensive with reality.
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It is the business of future to be dangerous.... The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur.
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Philosophy is the product of wonder. The effort after the general characterization of the world around us is the romance of human thought.
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It does not matter what men say in words, so long as their activities are controlled by settled instincts. The words may ultimately destroy the instincts but until this has occurred, words do not count.
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Nobody has a right to speak more clearly than he thinks.
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After you understand about the sun and the stars and the rotation of the earth, you may still miss the radiance of the sunset.
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Knowledge is always accompanied with accessories of emotion and purpose.
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Vigorous societies harbour a certain extravagance of objectives.
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The real history does not get written, because it is not in people's brains but in their nerves and vitals.
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Every intellectual revolution which has ever stirred humanity into greatness has been a passionate protest against inert ideas. Then, alas, with pathetic ignorance of human psychology, it has proceeded by some educational scheme to bind humanity afresh with inert ideas of its own fashioning.
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I have always noticed that deeply and truly religious persons are fond of a joke, and I am suspicious of those who aren't.
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Wisdom alone is true ambition's aim, wisdom is the source of virtue and of fame obtained with labour, for mankind employed, and then, when most you share it, best enjoyed.
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Symbolism is no mere idle fancy or corrupt degeneration: it is inherent in the very texture of human life.
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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