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In a living civilization there is always an element of unrest, for sensitiveness to ideas means curiosity, adventure, change. Civilized order survives on its merits and is transformed by its power of recognizing its imperfections.

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
Means
Civilized
Sensitiveness
Order
Element
Unrest
Change
Merit
Survives
Power
Curiosity
Merits
Ideas
Adventure
Imperfections
Mean
Elements
Imperfection
Always
Civilization
Recognizing
Living
Transformed

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The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.
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With the sense of sight, the idea communicates the emotion, whereas, with sound, the emotion communicates the idea, which is more direct and therefore more powerful.
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Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.
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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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Knowledge is always accompanied with accessories of emotion and purpose.
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The justification for a university is that it preserves the connection between knowledge and the zest of life, by uniting the young and the old in the imaginative consideration of learning.
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Inventive genius requires pleasurable mental activity as a condition for its vigorous exercise
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Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of life is to grasp as much as we can out of that infinitude.
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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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Do not teach too many subjects and what you teach, teach thoroughly.
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Systems, scientific or philosophic, come and go. Each method of limited understanding is at length exhausted. In its prime each system is a triumphant success: in its decay it is an obstructive nuisance.
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Seek simplicity but distrust it.
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I consider Christianity to be one of the great disasters of the human race... It would be impossible to imagine anything more un - Christianlike than theology.
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It is a safe rule to apply that, when a mathematical or philosophical author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense.
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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.
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Style, in its finest sense, is the last acquirement of the educated mind it is also the most useful. It pervades the whole being.
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There is only one subject matter for education, and that is Life in all its manifestations
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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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No science can be more secure than the unconscious metaphysics which tacitly it presupposes.
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The pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit.
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