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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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Alfred North Whitehead
Age: 86 †
Born: 1861
Born: February 15
Died: 1947
Died: December 30
Mathematician
Philosopher
Physicist
Theologian
Writer
Ramsgate
Kent
Understanding
Decay
Success
Prime
Come
Length
Systems
Limited
Philosophic
Scientific
Nuisance
Method
Triumphant
System
Exhausted
More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead
A race preserves its vigor so long as it harbors a real contrast between what has been and what may be and so long as it is nerved by the vigor to adventure beyond the safeties of the past. Without adventure civilization is in full decay.
Alfred North Whitehead
Great people plant trees they'll never sit under.
Alfred North Whitehead
Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.
Alfred North Whitehead
The pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit.
Alfred North Whitehead
There is a quality of life which lies always beyond the mere fact of life and when we include the quality in the fact, there is still omitted the quality of the quality.
Alfred North Whitehead
Civilizations can only be understood by those who are civilized.
Alfred North Whitehead
The ideas of Freud were popularized by people who only imperfectly understood them, who were incapable of the great effort required to grasp them in their relationship to larger truths, and who therefore assigned to them a prominence out of all proportion to their true importance.
Alfred North Whitehead
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
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.
Alfred North Whitehead
Vedanta is the most impressive metaphysics the human mind has conceived.
Alfred North Whitehead
The oneness of the universe, and the oneness of each element of the universe, repeat themselves to the crack of doom in the creative advance from creature to creature, each creature including in itself the whole of history and exemplifying the self-identity of things and their mutual diversities.
Alfred North Whitehead
The aims of scientific thought are to see the general in the particular and the eternal in the transitory.
Alfred North Whitehead
In a sense, knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows: for details are swallowed up in principles.
Alfred North Whitehead
Mathematics as a science, commenced when first someone, probably a Greek, proved propositions about any things or about some things, without specifications of definite particular things.
Alfred North Whitehead
Peace is self-control at its widest-at the width where the self has been lost, and interest has been transferred to coordinations wider than personality.
Alfred North Whitehead
To come very near to a true theory, and to grasp its precise application, are two different things, as the history of science teaches us. Everything of importance has been said before by someone who did not discover it.
Alfred North Whitehead
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.
Alfred North Whitehead
Religion is the reaction of human nature to its search for God.
Alfred North Whitehead
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.
Alfred North Whitehead
Life is the enjoyment of emotion, derived from the past and aimed at the future.
Alfred North Whitehead
