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Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions.

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
Premises
Floats
Grasp
Reasoning
Reasonings
Deductions
Straws
Insistence
Float

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

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No Roman ever died in contemplation over a geometrical diagram.
Alfred North Whitehead
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No man of science wants merely to know. He acquires knowledge to appease his passion for discovery. He does not discover in order to know, he knows in order to discover.
Alfred North Whitehead
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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.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The fact of the religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The consequences of a plethora of half-digested theoretical knowledge are deplorable.
Alfred North Whitehead
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From the very beginning of his education, the child should experience the joy of discovery.
Alfred North Whitehead
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As society is now constituted, a literal adherence to the moral precepts scattered throughout the Gospels would mean sudden death.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The ultimate metaphysical ground is the creative advance into novelty.
Alfred North Whitehead
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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
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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.
Alfred North Whitehead
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It is this union of passionate interest in the detailed facts with equal devotion to abstract generalisation which forms the novelty in our present society .
Alfred North Whitehead
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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
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God is in the world, or nowhere, creating continually in us and around us. Insofar as man partakes of this creative process does he partake of the divine, of God, and that participation is his immortality.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Inventive genius requires pleasurable mental activity as a condition for its vigorous exercise
Alfred North Whitehead
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Dogmatism is the anti-Christ of learning.
Alfred North Whitehead
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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.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Learning preserves the errors of the past as well as its wisdom.
Alfred North Whitehead
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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.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The great achievements of the past were the adventures of the past. Only the adventurous can understand the greatness of the past.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Philosophy is the product of wonder. The effort after the general characterization of the world around us is the romance of human thought.
Alfred North Whitehead