Quote

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
Desire
Complexes
Experience
Complex
Must
Stones
Record
Habitual
Failure
Autobiography
Records
Interpretation
Asks
Enterprise
Success
Stone

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

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In a sense, knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows: for details are swallowed up in principles.
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What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like and immorality is what they dislike.
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Apart from God every activity is merely a passing whiff of insignificance.
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Great people plant trees they'll never sit under.
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The vigor of civilized societies is preserved by the widespread sense that high aims are worth-while.
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The purpose of education is not to fill a vessel but to kindle a flame.
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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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An unflinching determination to take the whole evidence into account is the only method of preservation against the fluctuating extremes of fashionable opinion.
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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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Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilisation of knowledge.
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No one who achieves success does so without acknowledging the help of others. The wise and confident acknowledge this help with gratitude.
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Everyone is a philosopher. Not everyone is good at it.
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Our rate of progress is such that an individual human being, of ordinary length of life, will be called on to face novel situations which find no parallel in his past. The fixed person, for the fixed duties, who, in older societies was such a godsend, in the future will be a public danger.
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Apart from blunt truth, our lives sink decadently amid the perfume of hints and suggestions.
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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.
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Rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality.
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Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.
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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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The world is shocked, or amused, by the sight of saintly old people hindering in the name of morality the removal of obvious brutalities from a legal system.
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An open mind is all very well in its way, but it ought not to be so open that there is no keeping anything in or out of it.
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