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Rationalism is an adventure in the clarification of thought.

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
Clarification
Rationalism
Adventure
Thought

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

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Knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows.
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Seek simplicity but distrust it.
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The motive of success is not enough.
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Mathematics, in its widest significance, is the development of all types of formal, necessary, deductive reasoning.
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...the only simplicity to be trusted is the simplicity to be found on the far side of complexity.
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Life is the enjoyment of emotion, derived from the past and aimed at the future.
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The fact of the religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience.
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It belongs to the self-respect of intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final unravelment.
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Youth is life as yet unblemished by much tragedy, but hardly by TV.
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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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Order is not sufficient. What is required, is something much more complex. It is order entering upon novelty so that the massiveness of order does not degenerate into mere repetition and so that the novelty is always reflected upon a background of system.
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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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...the self-satisfied dogmatism with which mankind at each period of its history cherishes the delusion of the finality of existing modes of knowledge.
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It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.
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I am sure that one secret of a successful teacher is that he has formulated quite clearly in his mind what the pupil has got to know in precise fashion. He will then cease from half-hearted attempts to worry his pupils with memorizing a lot of irrelevant stuff of inferior importance.
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Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.
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Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them.
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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.
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Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions.
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The chief error in philosophy is overstatement.
Alfred North Whitehead