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Alfred North Whitehead

Alfred North Whitehead

Alfred North Whitehead

Mathematician, Physicist, Philosopher. His student, Bertrand Russell, and he authored Principia Mathematica. His interest in epistemology led him to read all of Western Philosophy. When he retired from Cambridge, Harvard invited him to teach philosophy. He developed what is called Process Philosophy in which the indivisible units of reality are drops of experience that are subjects in the process of becoming actual; once concluded, they are objects. Process is fundamental to objects; physics focuses on objects but the connections in the universe are subjective in nature and therefore internal before becoming separate objects.

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Ideas won't keep, something must be done about them.

– Alfred North Whitehead

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A clash of doctrines is not a disaster--it is an opportunity.

– Alfred North Whitehead

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Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.

– Alfred North Whitehead

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The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.

– Alfred North Whitehead

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I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning , or destroyed it altogether.

– Alfred North Whitehead

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Periods of tranquility are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.

– Alfred North Whitehead

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Almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.

– Alfred North Whitehead

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An enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words.

– Alfred North Whitehead

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Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

– Alfred North Whitehead

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Beware the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.

– Alfred North Whitehead

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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

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Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

– Alfred North Whitehead

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Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking.

– Alfred North Whitehead

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Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning.

– Alfred North Whitehead

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Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.

– Alfred North Whitehead

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Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.

– Alfred North Whitehead

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I will not go so far as to say that to construct a history of thought without profound study of the mathematical ideas of successive epochs is like omitting Hamlet from the play which is named after him. . . But it is certainly analogous to cutting out the part of Ophelia. This simile is singularly exact. For Ophelia is quite essential to the play, she is very charming-- and a little mad.

– Alfred North Whitehead

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Ideas won't keep something must be done about them.

– Alfred North Whitehead

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If a dog jumps in your lap, it is because he is fond of you but if a cat does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer.

– Alfred North Whitehead

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If a dog jumps in your lap, it is because he is fond of you; but if a cat does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer.

– Alfred North Whitehead

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It does not matter what men say in words, so long as their activities are controlled by settled instincts. The words may ultimately destroy the instincts. But until this has occurred, words do not count. - from Science and the Modern World

– Alfred North Whitehead

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It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

– Alfred North Whitehead

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It takes a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

– Alfred North Whitehead

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Nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent, the nightingale for its song; and the sun for its radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves and should turn them into odes of self congratulation on the excellence of the human mind.

– Alfred North Whitehead

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Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.

– Alfred North Whitehead

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Philosophy is the product of wonder.

– Alfred North Whitehead

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Religion is what a person does in his solitariness.

– Alfred North Whitehead

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Seek simplicity, and distrust it.

– Alfred North Whitehead

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The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.

– Alfred North Whitehead

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The only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present. The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground; for it is the past, and it is the future.

– Alfred North Whitehead

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The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them.

– Alfred North Whitehead

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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.

– Alfred North Whitehead

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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.

– Alfred North Whitehead

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Through and through the world is infested with quantity. To talk sense is to talk quantities, It is no use saying the nation is large- how large? It is no use s aying that radium is scarce- how scarce? You can not evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves.

– Alfred North Whitehead

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We cannot think first and act afterward. From the moment of birth we are immersed in action, and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought.

– Alfred North Whitehead

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We think in generalities, but we live in detail.

– Alfred North Whitehead

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What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like, and immorality is what they dislike.

– Alfred North Whitehead

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Without adventure civilization is in full decay.

– Alfred North Whitehead

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