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Mathematics, in its widest significance, is the development of all types of formal, necessary, deductive reasoning.

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
Widest
Type
Types
Formal
Reasoning
Significance
Mathematics
Necessary
Deductive
Development

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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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Symbolism is no mere idle fancy or corrupt degeneration: it is inherent in the very texture of human life.
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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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Religion increasingly is tending to degenerate into a decent formula wherewith to embellish a comfortable life.
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The only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present. The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground for it is the past, and it is the future.
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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.
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Human nature loses its most precious quality when it is robbed of its sense of things beyond, unexplored and yet insistent.
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When success turns a man's head he faces failure
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It is natural to think that an abstract science cannot be of much importance in affairs of human life, because it has omitted from its consideration everything of real interest.
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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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The worship of God is not a rule of safety - it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable.
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The whole of mathematics consists in the organization of a series of aids to the imagination in the process of reasoning.
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It does not matter what men say in words, so long as their activities are controlled by settled instincts. The words may ultimately destroy the instincts but until this has occurred, words do not count.
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Common sense is genius in homespun.
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Learning preserves the errors of the past, as well as its wisdom. For this reason, dictionaries are public dangers, although they are necessities.
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It is not paradox to say that in our most theoretical moods we may be nearest to our most practical applications.
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The foundations of the world are to be found, not in the cognitive experience of conscious thought, but in the aesthetic experience of everyday life.
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The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanation of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be ``Seek simplicity and distrust it.''
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The paradox is now fully established that the utmost abstractions are the true weapons with which to control our thought of concrete fact.
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The preternatural solemnity of a good many of the professionally religious is to me a point against them.
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