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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
Metaphysical
Novelty
Advance
Ground
Ultimate
Creative

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

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The learned tradition is not concerned with truth, but with the learned adjustment of learned statements of antecedent learned people.
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
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Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning.
Alfred North Whitehead
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We must not expect simple answers to far-reaching questions. However far our gaze penetrates, there are always heights beyond which block our vision.
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A Unitarian is a person who believes in at most one God.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it. A merely well informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Philosophy is the product of wonder. The effort after the general characterization of the world around us is the romance of human thought.
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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You cannot be wise without some basis of knowledge, but you may easily acquire knowledge and remain bare of wisdom.
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.
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Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.
Alfred North Whitehead
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It belongs to the self-respect of intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final unravelment.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The power of Christianity lies in its revelation in act, of that which Plato divined in theory.
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Spoken language is merely a series of squeaks.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The consequences of a plethora of half-digested theoretical knowledge are deplorable.
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.
Alfred North Whitehead
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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.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Every really new idea looks crazy at first.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Imagination is not to be divorced from the facts. It is a way of illuminating the facts.
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.
Alfred North Whitehead