"The many become one and are increased by one."
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Quote collection
Alfred North Whitehead quotes (page 16 of 17)
326 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"A culture is in its finest flower before it begins to analyze itself."
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"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."
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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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"The great achievements of the past were the adventures of the past. Only the adventurous can understand the greatness of the past."
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"The only use of knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present."
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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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"Seek simplicity, then distrust."
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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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"Faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology."
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"The term many presupposes the term one , and the term one presupposes the term many."
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"The race that does not value trained intelligence is doomed."
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"Mathematics, in its widest significance, is the development of all types of formal, necessary, deductive reasoning."
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"Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness."
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"We must produce a great age, or see the collapse of the upward striving of our race."
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"In England if something goes wrong--say, if one finds a skunk in the garden--he writes to the family solicitor, who proceeds to take the proper measures; whereas in America, you telephone the fire department. Each satisfies a characteristic need; in the English, love of order and legalistic procedure; and here in America, what you like is something vivid, and red, and swift."
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"Error itself may be happy chance."
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"When success turns a man's head he faces failure"
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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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"The physical doctrine of the atom has got into a state which is strongly suggestive of the epicycles of astronomy before Copernicus ."
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