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The importance of an individual thinker owes something to chance. For it depends upon the fate of his ideas in the minds of his successors.
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
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Owes
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Minds
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More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead
In order to acquire learning, we must first shake ourselves free of it.
Alfred North Whitehead
We must not expect simple answers to far-reaching questions. However far our gaze penetrates, there are always heights beyond which block our vision.
Alfred North Whitehead
A man of science doesn't discover in order to know, he wants to know in order to discover.
Alfred North Whitehead
Common sense is genius in homespun.
Alfred North Whitehead
The vigor of civilized societies is preserved by the widespread sense that high aims are worth-while.
Alfred North Whitehead
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
The chief danger to philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence.
Alfred North Whitehead
The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment... We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this great science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it.
Alfred North Whitehead
No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it.
Alfred North Whitehead
It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. This statement is almost a tautology. For the energy of operation of a proposition in an occasion of experience is its interest and is its importance. But of course a true proposition is more apt to be interesting than a false one.
Alfred North Whitehead
An open mind is all very well in its way, but it ought not to be so open that there is no keeping anything in or out of it.
Alfred North Whitehead
In its solitariness the spirit asks, What, in the way of value, is the attainment of life? And it can find no such value till it has merged its individual claim with that of the objective universe. Religion is world-loyalty.
Alfred North Whitehead
Religion increasingly is tending to degenerate into a decent formula wherewith to embellish a comfortable life.
Alfred North Whitehead
The factor in human life provocative of a noble discontent is the gradual emergence of a sense of criticism, founded upon appreciation of beauty, and of intellectual distinction, and of duty.
Alfred North Whitehead
Mathematics, in its widest significance, is the development of all types of formal, necessary, deductive reasoning.
Alfred North Whitehead
Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure.
Alfred North Whitehead
Faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology.
Alfred North Whitehead
Systems, scientific or philosophic, come and go. Each method of limited understanding is at length exhausted. In its prime each system is a triumphant success: in its decay it is an obstructive nuisance.
Alfred North Whitehead
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.
Alfred North Whitehead
You may not divide the seamless coat of learning.
Alfred North Whitehead
