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The chief danger to philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence.

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
Evidence
Danger
Philosophy
Narrowness
Selection
Chief
Chiefs

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

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Philosophy is the product of wonder.
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Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning.
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The task of a university is the creation of the future, so far as rational thought and civilized modes of appreciation can affect the issue.
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Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.
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It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious.
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The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment.
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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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Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct form ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.
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The point about zero is that we do not need to use it in the operation of daily life. No one goes out to buy zero fish.
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Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness. Thus religion is solitariness and if you are never solitary, you are never religious.
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A race preserves its vigor so long as it harbors a real contrast between what has been and what may be and so long as it is nerved by the vigor to adventure beyond the safeties of the past. Without adventure civilization is in full decay.
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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.
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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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Learning is often spoken of as if we are watching the open pages of all the books which we have ever read, and then, when occasion arises, we select the right page to read aloud to the universe.
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The motive of success is not enough.
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In a sense, knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows, for details are swallowed up in principles. The details for knowledge which are important, will be picked up ad hoc in each avocation of life, but the habit of the active utilization of well-understood principles is the final possession of WISDOM.
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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.
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Peace is self-control at its widest-at the width where the self has been lost, and interest has been transferred to coordinations wider than personality.
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A philosopher of imposing stature doesn't think in a vacuum. Even his most abstract ideas are, to some extent, conditioned by what is or is not known in the time when he lives.
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There is a tradition of opposition between adherents of induction and of deduction. In my view it would be just as sensible for the two ends of a worm to quarrel.
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