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Intolerance is the besetting sin of moral fervour.

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
Besetting
Fervour
Intolerance
Sin
Moral

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

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Learning preserves the errors of the past as well as its wisdom.
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But harmony is limitation. Thus rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality. Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing.
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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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Speak out in acts the time for words has passed, and only deeds will suffice.
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The worst that happened to men of science was that Galileo suffered an honorable detention and a mild reproof, before dying peacefully in his bed.
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In modern times the belief that the ultimate explanation of all things was to be found in Newtonian mechanics was an adumbration of the truth that all science, as it grows towards perfection, becomes mathematical in its ideas.
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Without adventure all civilization is full of decay. Adventure rarely reaches its predetermined end. Columbus never reached China.
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But you can catch yourself entertaining habitually certain ideas and setting others aside and that, I think, is where our personal destinies are largely decided.
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To see what is general in what is particular, and what is permanent in what is transitory, is the aim of scientific thought.
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There is no nature at an instant.
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The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment.
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There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays to the devil.
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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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Great people plant trees they'll never sit under.
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The physical doctrine of the atom has got into a state which is strongly suggestive of the epicycles of astronomy before Copernicus .
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The chief error in philosophy is overstatement.
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The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature throughout the centuries is the notion of 'independent existence.' There is no such mode of existence every entity is to be understood in terms of the way it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.
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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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The point about zero is that we do not need to use it in the operations of daily life. No one goes out to buy zero fish. It is in a way the most civilised of all the cardinals, and its use is only forced on us by the needs of cultivated modes of thought.
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The 'silly question' is the first intimation of some totally novel development.
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