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Philosophy asks the simple question: What is it all about?

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
Question
Philosophy
Asks
Simple

More quotes by 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 chief danger to philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Nobody has a right to speak more clearly than he thinks.
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The motive of success is not enough.
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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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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
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The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Youth is life as yet unblemished by much tragedy, but hardly by TV.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Governments are best classified by considering who are the 'somebodies' they are in fact endeavouring to satisfy.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Human nature loses its most precious quality when it is robbed of its sense of things beyond, unexplored and yet insistent.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Our rate of progress is such that an individual human being, of ordinary length of life, will be called on to face novel situations which find no parallel in his past. The fixed person, for the fixed duties, who, in older societies was such a godsend, in the future will be a public danger.
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We think in generalities, but we live in detail.
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Science repudiates philosophy. In other words, it has never cared to justify its truth or explain its meaning.
Alfred North Whitehead
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That knowledge which adds greatness to character is knowledge so handled as to transform every phase of immediate experience.
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When success turns a man's head he faces failure
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Spoken language is merely a series of squeaks.
Alfred North Whitehead
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It is the business of the future to be dangerous and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties.
Alfred North Whitehead
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In a sense, knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows: for details are swallowed up in principles.
Alfred North Whitehead
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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.
Alfred North Whitehead
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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.
Alfred North Whitehead