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Knowledge does not keep any better than fish.

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
Doe
Better
Fish
Fishes
Knowledge
Keep

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

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The foundations of the world are to be found, not in the cognitive experience of conscious thought, but in the aesthetic experience of everyday life.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The only use of knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Nobody has a right to speak more clearly than he thinks.
Alfred North Whitehead
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There is no more common error than to assume that, because prolonged and accurate mathematical calculations have been made, the application of the result to some fact of nature is absolutely certain.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Ninety percent of our lives is governed by emotion. Our brains merely register and act upon what is telegraphed to them by our bodily experience. Intellect is to emotion as our clothes are to our bodies we could not very well have civilized life without clothes, but we would be in a poor way if we had only clothes without bodies.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The chief error in philosophy is overstatement.
Alfred North Whitehead
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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.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The term many presupposes the term one , and the term one presupposes the term many.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervor, live for it, and if need be, die for it.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Fertilization of the soul is the reason for the necessity of art.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it. A merely well informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth.
Alfred North Whitehead
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What the learned world tends to offer is one second-hand scrap of information illustrating ideas derived from another second-hand scrap of information. The second-handedness of the learned world is the secret of its mediocrity.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The whole of mathematics consists in the organization of a series of aids to the imagination in the process of reasoning.
Alfred North Whitehead
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God is in the world, or nowhere, creating continually in us and around us. Insofar as man partakes of this creative process does he partake of the divine, of God, and that participation is his immortality.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.
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 chief danger to philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Error itself may be happy chance.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Above all things we must be aware of what I will call 'inert ideas' - that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilized, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations.
Alfred North Whitehead