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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.

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
Everything
Abstract
Humans
Affair
Real
Importance
Much
Interest
Think
Natural
Thinking
Science
Omitted
Life
Cannot
Affairs
Human
Consideration

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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.
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The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order. Life refuses to be embalmed alive. The more prolonged the halt in some unrelieved system of order, the greater the crash of the dead society.
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A culture is in its finest flower before it begins to analyze itself.
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Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.
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The future belongs to those who can rise above the confines of the earth.
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Knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows.
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The main importance of Francis Bacon's influence does not lie in any peculiar theory of inductive reasoning which he happened to express, but in the revolt against second-hand information of which he was a leader.
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The power of Christianity lies in its revelation in act, of that which Plato divined in theory.
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An unflinching determination to take the whole evidence into account is the only method of preservation against the fluctuating extremes of fashionable opinion.
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Ninety percent of our lives is governed by emotion. Our brains merely register and act upon what is telegraphed to them by our bodily experience. Intellect is to emotion as our clothes are to our bodies we could not very well have civilized life without clothes, but we would be in a poor way if we had only clothes without bodies.
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Common sense is genius in homespun.
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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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Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.
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When success turns a man's head he faces failure
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There is only one subject matter for education, and that is Life in all its manifestations
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Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.
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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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You cannot evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music, and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves.
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Faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology.
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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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