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Our habitual experience is a complex of failure and success in the enterprise of interpretation. If we desire a record of uninterpreted experience, we must ask a stone to record its autobiography.
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
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Enterprise
Success
Stone
Desire
Complexes
Experience
Complex
Must
Stones
Record
Habitual
Failure
Autobiography
Records
Interpretation
More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead
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.
Alfred North Whitehead
It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. This statement is almost a tautology. For the energy of operation of a proposition in an occasion of experience is its interest and is its importance. But of course a true proposition is more apt to be interesting than a false one.
Alfred North Whitehead
The importance of an individual thinker owes something to chance. For it depends upon the fate of his ideas in the minds of his successors.
Alfred North Whitehead
The only justification in the use of force is to reduce the amount of force necessary to be used.
Alfred North Whitehead
The consequences of a plethora of half-digested theoretical knowledge are deplorable.
Alfred North Whitehead
It is a safe rule to apply that, when a mathematical or philosophical author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense.
Alfred North Whitehead
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.
Alfred North Whitehead
Rationalism is an adventure in the clarification of thought.
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
Vedanta is the most impressive metaphysics the human mind has conceived.
Alfred North Whitehead
Without deductive logic science would be entirely useless. It is merely a barren game to ascend from the particular to the general, unless afterwards we can reverse the process and descend from the general to the particular, ascending and descending like angels on Jacob's ladder.
Alfred North Whitehead
The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.
Alfred North Whitehead
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
The result of teaching small parts of a large number of subjects is the passive reception of disconnected ideas, not illumed with any spark of vitality.
Alfred North Whitehead
Thus the negative perception is the triumph of consciousness.
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
As society is now constituted, a literal adherence to the moral precepts scattered throughout the Gospels would mean sudden death.
Alfred North Whitehead
The ideas of Freud were popularized by people who only imperfectly understood them, who were incapable of the great effort required to grasp them in their relationship to larger truths, and who therefore assigned to them a prominence out of all proportion to their true importance.
Alfred North Whitehead
An enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words.
Alfred North Whitehead
If a dog jumps into your lap, it is because he is fond of you but if a cat does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer.
Alfred North Whitehead
