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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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Alfred North Whitehead
Age: 86 †
Born: 1861
Born: February 15
Died: 1947
Died: December 30
Mathematician
Philosopher
Physicist
Theologian
Writer
Ramsgate
Kent
Perceive
Details
Past
Live
Must
Make
Generalities
Think
Addition
Thinking
Detail
More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead
The real history does not get written, because it is not in people's brains but in their nerves and vitals.
Alfred North Whitehead
Wisdom alone is true ambition's aim, wisdom is the source of virtue and of fame obtained with labour, for mankind employed, and then, when most you share it, best enjoyed.
Alfred North Whitehead
The ultimate metaphysical ground is the creative advance into novelty.
Alfred North Whitehead
The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.
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On the ostensible exactitude of certain branches of human knowledge, including mathematics. The exactness is a fake.
Alfred North Whitehead
Each generation criticizes the unconscious assumptions made by its parent. It may assent to them, but it brings them out in the open.
Alfred North Whitehead
The English never abolish anything. They put it in cold storage.
Alfred North Whitehead
The antithesis between a technical and a liberal education is fallacious. There can be no adequate technical education which is not liberal, and no liberal education which is not technical.
Alfred North Whitehead
The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanation of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be ``Seek simplicity and distrust it.''
Alfred North Whitehead
Every organism requires an environment of friends, partly to shield it from violent changes, and partly to supply it with its wants.
Alfred North Whitehead
The fixed person for the fixed duties who in older societies was such a godsend, in future will be a public danger.
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Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct form ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.
Alfred North Whitehead
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
The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention.
Alfred North Whitehead
Vigorous societies harbor a certain extravagance of objectives, so that men wander beyond the safe provision of personal gratifications.
Alfred North Whitehead
Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.
Alfred North Whitehead
A clash of doctrine is not a disaster, it is an opportunity.
Alfred North Whitehead
I put forward as a general definition of civilization, that a civilized society is exhibiting the five qualities of Truth, Beauty, Adventure, Art, Peace.
Alfred North Whitehead
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.
Alfred North Whitehead
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