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The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention.

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
Nineteenth
Invention
Method
Century
Greatest

More quotes by 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.
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Apart from blunt truth, our lives sink decadently amid the perfume of hints and suggestions.
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An enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words.
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What we perceive as the present is the vivid fringe of memory tinged with anticipation.
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Nobody has a right to speak more clearly than he thinks.
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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.
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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.
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Nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent, the nightingale for its song and the sun for its radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves and should turn them into odes of self congratulation on the excellence of the human mind.
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Through and through the world is infested with quantity: To talk sense is to talk quantities. It is no use saying the nation is large. . . . How large? It is no use saying the radium is scarce. . . . How scarce? You cannot evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music, and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves.
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You think the world is what it looks like in fine weather at noon day I think it is what it seems like in the early morning when one first wakes from deep sleep.
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The learned tradition is not concerned with truth, but with the learned adjustment of learned statements of antecedent learned people.
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Art heightens the sense of humanity. It gives an elation to feeling which is supernatural...A million sunsets will not spur us on towards civilization. It requires Art to evoke into consciousness the finite perfections which lie ready for human achievement.
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The factor in human life provocative of a noble discontent is the gradual emergence of a sense of criticism, founded upon appreciation of beauty, and of intellectual distinction, and of duty.
Alfred North Whitehead
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By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and in effect increases the mental power of the race.
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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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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.
Alfred North Whitehead
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On the ostensible exactitude of certain branches of human knowledge, including mathematics. The exactness is a fake.
Alfred North Whitehead
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All practical teachers know that education is a patient process of mastery of details, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day.
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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.
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It is natural to think that an abstract science cannot be of much importance in affairs of human life, because it has omitted from its consideration everything of real interest.
Alfred North Whitehead