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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
Details
Past
Live
Must
Make
Generalities
Think
Addition
Thinking
Detail
Perceive
More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead
From the very beginning of his education, the child should experience the joy of discovery.
Alfred North Whitehead
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
In a living civilization there is always an element of unrest, for sensitiveness to ideas means curiosity, adventure, change. Civilized order survives on its merits and is transformed by its power of recognizing its imperfections.
Alfred North Whitehead
It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression.
Alfred North Whitehead
Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.
Alfred North Whitehead
Science repudiates philosophy. In other words, it has never cared to justify its truth or explain its meaning.
Alfred North Whitehead
Democracy...is a society in which the unbeliever feels undisturbed and at home. If there were only a half dozen unbelievers in America, their well-being would be a test of our democracy.
Alfred North Whitehead
Mathematics, in its widest significance, is the development of all types of formal, necessary, deductive reasoning.
Alfred North Whitehead
In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory.
Alfred North Whitehead
The chief danger to philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence.
Alfred North Whitehead
...the only simplicity to be trusted is the simplicity to be found on the far side of complexity.
Alfred North Whitehead
How the past perishes is how the future becomes.
Alfred North Whitehead
Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure, a sense of nothing having been done before, of complete freedom to experiment.
Alfred North Whitehead
Knowledge does not keep any better than fish.
Alfred North Whitehead
We must produce a great age, or see the collapse of the upward striving of our race.
Alfred North Whitehead
No reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the ground of rationality.
Alfred North Whitehead
In a sense, knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows: for details are swallowed up in principles.
Alfred North Whitehead
The foundation of reverence is this perception, that the present holds within itself the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, that whole amplitude of time, which is eternity.
Alfred North Whitehead
It is this union of passionate interest in the detailed facts with equal devotion to abstract generalisation which forms the novelty in our present society .
Alfred North Whitehead
The vastest knowledge of today cannot transcend the buddhi of the Rishis in ancient India and science in its most advanced stage now is closer to Vedanta than ever before.
Alfred North Whitehead
