Quote

I always feel that I have two duties to perform with a parting guest: one, to see that he doesn't forget anything that is his the other, to see that he doesn't take anything that is mine.

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
Feels
Mine
Always
Duty
Forget
Parting
Doesn
Guest
Two
Duties
Anything
Guests
Take
Perform
Feel
Mines

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As society is now constituted, a literal adherence to the moral precepts scattered throughout the Gospels would mean sudden death.
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Order is not sufficient. What is required, is something much more complex. It is order entering upon novelty so that the massiveness of order does not degenerate into mere repetition and so that the novelty is always reflected upon a background of system.
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Style, in its finest sense, is the last acquirement of the educated mind it is also the most useful. It pervades the whole being.
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The main importance of Francis Bacon's influence does not lie in any peculiar theory of inductive reasoning which he happened to express, but in the revolt against second-hand information of which he was a leader.
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People make the mistake of talking about 'natural laws.' There are no natural laws. There are only temporary habits of nature.
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But harmony is limitation. Thus rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality. Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing.
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The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.
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The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order. Life refuses to be embalmed alive. The more prolonged the halt in some unrelieved system of order, the greater the crash of the dead society.
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The vigor of civilized societies is preserved by the widespread sense that high aims are worth-while.
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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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The aims of scientific thought are to see the general in the particular and the eternal in the transitory.
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Nature is probably quite indifferent to the aesthetic preferences of mathematicians.
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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.
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The race that does not value trained intelligence is doomed.
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The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.
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In a living civilization there is always an element of unrest, for sensitiveness to ideas means curiosity, adventure, change. Civilized order survives on its merits and is transformed by its power of recognizing its imperfections.
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The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention.
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