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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

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Alfred North Whitehead
Age: 86 †
Born: 1861
Born: February 15
Died: 1947
Died: December 30
Mathematician
Philosopher
Physicist
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Writer
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More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

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Nobody has a right to speak more clearly than he thinks.
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In all education the main cause of failure is staleness.
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The difference between ancients and moderns is that the ancients asked what have we experienced, and moderns asked what can we experience.
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Philosophy asks the simple question: What is it all about?
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Democracy...is a society in which the unbeliever feels undisturbed and at home. If there were only a half dozen unbelievers in America, their well-being would be a test of our democracy.
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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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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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Each generation criticizes the unconscious assumptions made by its parent. It may assent to them, but it brings them out in the open.
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The human body is an instrument for the production of art in the life of the human soul.
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Great people plant trees they'll never sit under.
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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.''
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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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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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That knowledge which adds greatness to character is knowledge so handled as to transform every phase of immediate experience.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The foundations of the world are to be found, not in the cognitive experience of conscious thought, but in the aesthetic experience of everyday life.
Alfred North Whitehead
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A science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The point about zero is that we do not need to use it in the operation of daily life. No one goes out to buy zero fish.
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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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 greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention.
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