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Vigorous societies harbor a certain extravagance of objectives, so that men wander beyond the safe provision of personal gratifications.

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
Objectives
Extravagance
Safe
Harbor
Beyond
Harbors
Personal
Provision
Certain
Vigorous
Men
Gratification
Societies
Gratifications
Wander
Civilised

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

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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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There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays to the devil.
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All practical teachers know that education is a patient process of mastery of details, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day.
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It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.
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The real history does not get written, because it is not in people's brains but in their nerves and vitals.
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Seek simplicity, then distrust.
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Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.
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It is natural to think that an abstract science cannot be of much importance in affairs of human life, because it has omitted from its consideration everything of real interest.
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The progress of Science consists in observing interconnections and in showing with a patient ingenuity that the events of this ever-shifting world are but examples of a few general relations, called laws. To see what is general in what is particular, and what is permanent in what is transitory, is the aim of scientific thought.
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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.
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Knowledge keeps no better than fish.
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No reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the ground of rationality.
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Shakespeare wrote better poetry for not knowing too much Milton, I think, knew too much finally for the good of his poetry.
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You may not divide the seamless coat of learning.
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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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Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of life is to grasp as much as we can out of that infinitude.
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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.
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It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.
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Now in creative thought common sense is a bad master. Its sole criterion for judgement is that the new ideas shall look like the old ones. In other words it can only work by suppressing originality.
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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.
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