Quote

Identification of rhythm as the casual counterpart of life wherever there is some life, only perceptible to us when the analogies are sufficiently close.

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
Sufficiently
Casual
Wherever
Rhythm
Perceptible
Close
Counterpart
Life
Counterparts
Analogies
Identification

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

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It is not paradox to say that in our most theoretical moods we may be nearest to our most practical applications.
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Problems are only opportunities in disquise.
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The result of teaching small parts of a large number of subjects is the passive reception of disconnected ideas, not illumed with any spark of vitality.
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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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The progress of Science consists in observing interconnections and in showing with a patient ingenuity that the events of this ever-shifting world are but examples of a few general relations, called laws. To see what is general in what is particular, and what is permanent in what is transitory, is the aim of scientific thought.
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Systems, scientific or philosophic, come and go. Each method of limited understanding is at length exhausted. In its prime each system is a triumphant success: in its decay it is an obstructive nuisance.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.
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In a sense, knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows: for details are swallowed up in principles.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Now in creative thought common sense is a bad master. Its sole criterion for judgement is that the new ideas shall look like the old ones. In other words it can only work by suppressing originality.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Thus the negative perception is the triumph of consciousness.
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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.
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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No science can be more secure than the unconscious metaphysics which tacitly it presupposes.
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In order to acquire learning, we must first shake ourselves free of it.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Some philosophers fail to distinguish propositions from judgements ... But in the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. The importance of truth is that it adds to interest.
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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The vigor of civilized societies is preserved by the widespread sense that high aims are worth-while.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Without adventure civilization is in full decay. ... The great fact [is] that in their day the great achievements of the past were the adventures of the past.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Routine is the god of every social system it is the seventh heaven of business, the essential component in the success of every factory, the ideal of every statesman. The social machine should run like clockwork.
Alfred North Whitehead
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If you have had your attention directed to the novelties in thought in your own lifetime, you will have observed that almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced, and almost any idea which jogs you out of your current abstractions may be better than nothing.
Alfred North Whitehead