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Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity.

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
Consciousness
Philosophy
Self
Correction
Subjectivity
Corrections
Initial
Initials
Excess

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

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So far as the mere imparting of information is concerned, no university has had any justification for existence since the popularization of printing in the fifteenth century.
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Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness.
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We think in generalities, but we live in detail. To make the past live, we must perceive it in detail in addition to thinking of it in generalities.
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Science repudiates philosophy. In other words, it has never cared to justify its truth or explain its meaning.
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It is the business of future to be dangerous.... The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur.
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On the ostensible exactitude of certain branches of human knowledge, including mathematics. The exactness is a fake.
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Without adventure civilization is in full decay.
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It must be admitted that there is a degree of instability which is inconsistent with civilization. But, on the whole, the great ages have been unstable ages.
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I consider Christianity to be one of the great disasters of the human race... It would be impossible to imagine anything more un - Christianlike than theology.
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The only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present. The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground for it is the past, and it is the future.
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The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation.
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That knowledge which adds greatness to character is knowledge so handled as to transform every phase of immediate experience.
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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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There is a tradition of opposition between adherents of induction and of deduction. In my view it would be just as sensible for the two ends of a worm to quarrel.
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The absolute pacifist is a bad citizen times come when force must be used to uphold right, justice and ideals.
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People make the mistake of talking about 'natural laws.' There are no natural laws. There are only temporary habits of nature.
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Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of life is to grasp as much as we can out of that infinitude.
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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.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Ninety percent of our lives is governed by emotion.
Alfred North Whitehead
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What the learned world tends to offer is one second-hand scrap of information illustrating ideas derived from another second-hand scrap of information. The second-handedness of the learned world is the secret of its mediocrity.
Alfred North Whitehead