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The ultimate metaphysical ground is the creative advance into novelty.

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
Ground
Ultimate
Creative
Metaphysical
Novelty
Advance

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

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The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.
Alfred North Whitehead
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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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No man of science wants merely to know. He acquires knowledge to appease his passion for discovery. He does not discover in order to know, he knows in order to discover.
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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.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Great people plant trees they'll never sit under.
Alfred North Whitehead
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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 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.
Alfred North Whitehead
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A man really writes for an audience of about ten persons. Of course if others like it, that is clear gain. But if those ten are satisfied, he is content.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervor, live for it, and if need be, die for it.
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Every organism requires an environment of friends, partly to shield it from violent changes, and partly to supply it with its wants.
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I am also greatly indebted to Bergson, William James, and John Dewey. One of my preoccupations has been to rescue their type of thought from the charge of anti-intellectualism, which rightly or wrongly has been associated with it.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Knowledge keeps no better than fish.
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There is no nature in an instant.
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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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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Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Learning preserves the errors of the past, as well as its wisdom. For this reason, dictionaries are public dangers, although they are necessities.
Alfred North Whitehead
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I would be a billionaire if I was looking to be a selfish boss. That's not me.
Alfred North Whitehead
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[In many circumstances,] the most important thing about a proposition is not that it be true, but that it be interesting.
Alfred North Whitehead
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It is the business of the future to be dangerous and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties.
Alfred North Whitehead