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Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are cavalry charges in a battle - they are limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.

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
Moments
Perform
Cavalry
Thought
Fresh
Charges
Without
Limited
Decisive
Must
Horse
Extending
Important
Battle
Advances
Made
Civilization
Horses
Thinking
Number
Require
Numbers
Operations

More quotes by 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.
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From the moment of birth we are immersed in action, and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought.
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No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it.
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Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions.
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There is a quality of life which lies always beyond the mere fact of life and when we include the quality in the fact, there is still omitted the quality of the quality.
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I have always noticed that deeply and truly religious persons are fond of a joke, and I am suspicious of those who aren't.
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The race that does not value trained intelligence is doomed.
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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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You may not divide the seamless coat of learning.
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Vigorous societies harbour a certain extravagance of objectives.
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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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Life is complex in its expression, involving more than percipience, namely desire, emotion, will, and feeling.
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In every age of well-marked transition, there is the pattern of habitual dumb practice and emotion which is passing and there is oncoming a new complex of habit.
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Mathematics, in its widest significance, is the development of all types of formal, necessary, deductive reasoning.
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Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.
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The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, seek simplicity and distrust it.
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Every organism requires an environment of friends, partly to shield it from violent changes, and partly to supply it with its wants.
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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.
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There is no nature in an instant.
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It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression.
Alfred North Whitehead