"Vedanta is the most impressive metaphysics the human mind has conceived."
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Quote collection
Alfred North Whitehead quotes (page 4 of 17)
326 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true."
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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."
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"It is a safe rule to apply that, when a mathematical or philosophical author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense."
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"Rationalism is an adventure in the clarification of thought."
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"Above all things we must be aware of what I will call 'inert ideas' - that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilized, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations."
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"Human nature loses its most precious quality when it is robbed of its sense of things beyond, unexplored and yet insistent."
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"Great people plant trees they'll never sit under."
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"Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas."
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"Without adventure civilization is in full decay."
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"Apart from God every activity is merely a passing whiff of insignificance."
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"Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct form ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended."
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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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"To come very near to a true theory, and to grasp its precise application, are two different things, as the history of science teaches us. Everything of importance has been said before by someone who did not discover it."
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"Education which is not modern share the fate of all organic things which are kept too long."
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"The purpose of education is not to fill a vessel but to kindle a flame."
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"The oneness of the universe, and the oneness of each element of the universe, repeat themselves to the crack of doom in the creative advance from creature to creature, each creature including in itself the whole of history and exemplifying the self-identity of things and their mutual diversities."
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"Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it."
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"Fertilization of the soul is the reason for the necessity of art."
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"It is impossible not to feel stirred at the thought of the emotions of man at certain historic moments of adventure and discovery - Columbus when he first saw the Western shore, Pizarro when he stared at the Pacific Ocean, Franklin when the electric spark came from the string of his kite, Galileo when he first turned his telescope to the heavens. Such moments are also granted to students in the abstract regions of thought, and high among them must be placed the morning when Descartes lay in bed and invented the method of co-ordinate geometry."
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