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Every intellectual revolution which has ever stirred humanity into greatness has been a passionate protest against inert ideas. Then, alas, with pathetic ignorance of human psychology, it has proceeded by some educational scheme to bind humanity afresh with inert ideas of its own fashioning.

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
Humans
Greatness
Scheme
Every
Ignorance
Pathetic
Revolution
Schemes
Fashioning
Intellectual
Alas
Afresh
Humanity
Protest
Proceeded
Ideas
Psychology
Inert
Ever
Educational
Stirred
Human
Passionate
Bind

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

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Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.
Alfred North Whitehead
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I am sure that one secret of a successful teacher is that he has formulated quite clearly in his mind what the pupil has got to know in precise fashion. He will then cease from half-hearted attempts to worry his pupils with memorizing a lot of irrelevant stuff of inferior importance.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct form ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The only use of knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present.
Alfred North Whitehead
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I regret that it has been necessary for me in this lecture to administer a large dose of four-dimensional geometry. I do not apologize, because I am really not responsible for the fact that nature in its most fundamental aspect is four-dimensional. Things are what they are.
Alfred North Whitehead
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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.
Alfred North Whitehead
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On the ostensible exactitude of certain branches of human knowledge, including mathematics. The exactness is a fake.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent, the nightingale for its song and the sun for its radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves and should turn them into odes of self congratulation on the excellence of the human mind.
Alfred North Whitehead
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In a sense, knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows, for details are swallowed up in principles. The details for knowledge which are important, will be picked up ad hoc in each avocation of life, but the habit of the active utilization of well-understood principles is the final possession of WISDOM.
Alfred North Whitehead
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There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays to the devil.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Life is complex in its expression, involving more than percipience, namely desire, emotion, will, and feeling.
Alfred North Whitehead
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In this modern world, the celibacy of the medieval learned class has been replaced by a celibacy of the intellect which is divorced from the concrete contemplation of the complete facts.
Alfred North Whitehead
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I consider Christian theology to be one of the great disasters of the human race.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Intolerance is the besetting sin of moral fervour.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth.
Alfred North Whitehead
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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 .
Alfred North Whitehead
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Vigorous societies harbour a certain extravagance of objectives.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Aristotle discovered all the half-truths which were necessary to the creation of science.
Alfred North Whitehead
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You think the world is what it looks like in fine weather at noon day I think it is what it seems like in the early morning when one first wakes from deep sleep.
Alfred North Whitehead
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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.''
Alfred North Whitehead