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No science can be more secure than the unconscious metaphysics which tacitly it presupposes.

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
Science
Tacitly
Presupposes
Metaphysics
Unconscious
Secure

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

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A philosopher of imposing stature doesn't think in a vacuum. Even his most abstract ideas are, to some extent, conditioned by what is or is not known in the time when he lives.
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The purpose of education is not to fill a vessel but to kindle a flame.
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Apart from blunt truth, our lives sink decadently amid the perfume of hints and suggestions.
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Through and through the world is infested with quantity: To talk sense is to talk quantities. It is no use saying the nation is large. . . . How large? It is no use saying the radium is scarce. . . . How scarce? 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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It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.
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No reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the ground of rationality.
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The vigor of civilized societies is preserved by the widespread sense that high aims are worth-while.
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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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Seek simplicity but distrust it.
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Apart from God every activity is merely a passing whiff of insignificance.
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The chief error in philosophy is overstatement.
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You cannot be wise without some basis of knowledge, but you may easily acquire knowledge and remain bare of wisdom.
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Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions.
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Education which is not modern share the fate of all organic things which are kept too long.
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Common sense is genius in homespun.
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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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No religion can be considered in abstraction from its followers, or even from its various types of followers.
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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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Seek simplicity, and distrust it.
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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 .
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