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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
Invention
Method
Century
Greatest
Nineteenth

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Education should turn out the pupil with something he knows well and something he can do well.
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I have always noticed that deeply and truly religious persons are fond of a joke, and I am suspicious of those who aren't.
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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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Vedanta is the most impressive metaphysics the human mind has conceived.
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In a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world
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The science of pure mathematics, in its modern developments, may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit.
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Imagination is not to be divorced from the facts. It is a way of illuminating the facts.
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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.
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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.
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Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure.
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Every intellectual revolution which has ever stirred humanity into greatness has been a passionate protest against inert ideas. Then, alas, with pathetic ignorance of human psychology, it has proceeded by some educational scheme to bind humanity afresh with inert ideas of its own fashioning.
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Mathematics as a science, commenced when first someone, probably a Greek, proved propositions about any things or about some things, without specifications of definite particular things.
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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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The great achievements of the past were the adventures of the past. Only the adventurous can understand the greatness of the past.
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The ultimate metaphysical ground is the creative advance into novelty.
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Mathematics, in its widest significance, is the development of all types of formal, necessary, deductive reasoning.
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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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Intolerance is the besetting sin of moral fervour.
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People make the mistake of talking about 'natural laws.' There are no natural laws. There are only temporary habits of nature.
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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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