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The oneness of the universe, and the oneness of each element of the universe, repeat themselves to the crack of doom in the creative advance from creature to creature, each creature including in itself the whole of history and exemplifying the self-identity of things and their mutual diversities.

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
Repeats
Elements
Advance
Creatures
Creature
Diversities
Creative
Element
Doom
Universe
Mutual
Crack
History
Diversity
Oneness
Self
Including
Repeat
Whole
Cracks
Things
Identity

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

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What we perceive as the present is the vivid fringe of memory tinged with anticipation.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The paradox is now fully established that the utmost abstractions are the true weapons with which to control our thought of concrete fact.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Speak out in acts the time for words has passed, and only deeds will suffice.
Alfred North Whitehead
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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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The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment.
Alfred North Whitehead
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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.
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.
Alfred North Whitehead
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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.
Alfred North Whitehead
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An unflinching determination to take the whole evidence into account is the only method of preservation against the fluctuating extremes of fashionable opinion.
Alfred North Whitehead
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We think in generalities, but we live in detail. To make the past live, we must perceive it in detail in addition to thinking of it in generalities.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Not a sentence or a word is independent of the circumstances under which it is uttered.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilisation of knowledge.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The world is shocked, or amused, by the sight of saintly old people hindering in the name of morality the removal of obvious brutalities from a legal system.
Alfred North Whitehead
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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.
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 only simplicity to be trusted is the simplicity to be found on the far side of complexity.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The teleology of the Universe is directed to the production of Beauty... The type of Truth required for the final stretch of Beauty is a discovery and not a recapitulation... Apart from Beauty, Truth is neither good, nor bad... Truth matters because of beauty.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Knowledge is always accompanied with accessories of emotion and purpose.
Alfred North Whitehead
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A man of science doesn't discover in order to know, he wants to know in order to discover.
Alfred North Whitehead
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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.
Alfred North Whitehead