Alfred North Whitehead Quotes
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The ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction.
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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.
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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 human life is to grasp as much as we can out of the infinitude.
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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.
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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.
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Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.
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No member of a crew is praised for the rugged individuality of his rowing.
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The consequences of a plethora of half-digested theoretical knowledge are deplorable.
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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.
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The chief danger to philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence.
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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.
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The term many presupposes the term one, and the term one presupposes the term many.
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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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In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of a defeat; but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress towards victory.
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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.
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Scientists, animated by the purpose of proving they are purposeless, constitute an interesting subject for study.
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The deliberate aim at Peace very easily passes into its bastard substitute, Anesthesia.
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The English never abolish anything. They put it in cold storage.
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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 the devil.
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A race preserves its vigour so long as it harbours a real contrast between what has been and what may be, and so long as it is nerved by the vigour to adventure beyond the safeties of the past. Without adventure, civilization is in full decay.
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The Function of Reason (1929), Beacon Books, 1958, p. 16
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A general definition of civilization: a civilized society is exhibiting the five qualities of truth, beauty, adventure, art, peace.
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The chief error in philosophy is overstatement.
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Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.