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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
Come
Length
Systems
Limited
Philosophic
Scientific
Nuisance
Method
Triumphant
System
Exhausted
Understanding
Decay
Success
Prime
More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead
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.
Alfred North Whitehead
Every intellectual revolution which has ever stirred humanity into greatness has been a passionate protest against inert ideas. Then, alas, with pathetic ignorance of human psychology, it has proceeded by some educational scheme to bind humanity afresh with inert ideas of its own fashioning.
Alfred North Whitehead
The physical doctrine of the atom has got into a state which is strongly suggestive of the epicycles of astronomy before Copernicus .
Alfred North Whitehead
People make the mistake of talking about 'natural laws.' There are no natural laws. There are only temporary habits of nature.
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
You cannot be wise without some basis of knowledge, but you may easily acquire knowledge and remain bare of wisdom.
Alfred North Whitehead
Nobody has a right to speak more clearly than he thinks.
Alfred North Whitehead
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
The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.
Alfred North Whitehead
I put forward as a general definition of civilization, that a civilized society is exhibiting the five qualities of Truth, Beauty, Adventure, Art, Peace.
Alfred North Whitehead
It is a safe rule to apply that, when a mathematical or philosophical author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense.
Alfred North Whitehead
The merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth.
Alfred North Whitehead
But you can catch yourself entertaining habitually certain ideas and setting others aside and that, I think, is where our personal destinies are largely decided.
Alfred North Whitehead
The 'silly question' is the first intimation of some totally novel development.
Alfred North Whitehead
Human nature loses its most precious quality when it is robbed of its sense of things beyond, unexplored and yet insistent.
Alfred North Whitehead
Some philosophers fail to distinguish propositions from judgements ... But in the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. The importance of truth is that it adds to interest.
Alfred North Whitehead
Algebra reverses the relative importance of the factors in ordinary language.
Alfred North Whitehead
Every epoch has its character determined by the way its population reacts to the material events which they encounter.
Alfred North Whitehead
An unflinching determination to take the whole evidence into account is the only method of preservation against the fluctuating extremes of fashionable opinion.
Alfred North Whitehead
Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them.
Alfred North Whitehead
