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The chief error in philosophy is overstatement.
Alfred North Whitehead -
The Function of Reason (1929), Beacon Books, 1958, p. 16
Alfred North Whitehead
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The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment... We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this great science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it.
Alfred North Whitehead -
The chief danger to philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence.
Alfred North Whitehead -
Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of human life is to grasp as much as we can out of the infinitude.
Alfred North Whitehead -
A general definition of civilization: a civilized society is exhibiting the five qualities of truth, beauty, adventure, art, peace.
Alfred North Whitehead -
What the learned world tends to offer is one second-hand scrap of information illustrating ideas derived from another second-hand scrap of information. The second-handedness of the learned world is the secret of its mediocrity.
Alfred North Whitehead -
Life is complex in its expression, involving more than percipience, namely desire, emotion, will, and feeling.
Alfred North Whitehead
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...We cannot think first and act afterwards. From the moment of birth we are immersed in action and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought.
Alfred North Whitehead -
Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.
Alfred North Whitehead -
Some philosophers fail to distinguish propositions from judgments; … 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 -
Our habitual experience is a complex of failure and success in the enterprise of interpretation. If we desire a record of uninterpreted experience, we must ask a stone to record its autobiography.
Alfred North Whitehead -
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 -
There remains the final reflection, how shallow, puny, and imperfect are efforts to sound the depths in the nature of things. In philosophical discussion, the merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement is an exhibition of folly.
Alfred North Whitehead
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A precise language awaits a completed metaphysics.
Alfred North Whitehead -
The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order.
Alfred North Whitehead -
In its solitariness the spirit asks, What, in the way of value, is the attainment of life? And it can find no such value till it has merged its individual claim with that of the objective universe. Religion is world-loyalty.
Alfred North Whitehead -
The consequences of a plethora of half-digested theoretical knowledge are deplorable.
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 -
Shakespeare wrote better poetry for not knowing too much; Milton, I think, knew too much finally for the good of his poetry.
Alfred North Whitehead
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The English never abolish anything. They put it in cold storage.
Alfred North Whitehead -
A culture is in its finest flower before it begins to analyze itself.
Alfred North Whitehead -
Identification of rhythm as the causal counterpart of life; wherever there is some life, only perceptible to us when the analogies are sufficiently close.
Alfred North Whitehead -
There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.
Alfred North Whitehead