"Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure."
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Quote collection
Alfred North Whitehead quotes (page 7 of 17)
326 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"In all education the main cause of failure is staleness."
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"Scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study."
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"The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature."
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"Routine is the god of every social system; it is the seventh heaven of business, the essential component in the success of every factory, the ideal of every statesman. The social machine should run like clockwork."
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"The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato."
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"One main factor in the upward trend of animal life has been the power of wandering."
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"Intolerance is the besetting sin of moral fervour."
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"Learning preserves the errors of the past as well as its wisdom."
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"There is only one subject matter for education, and that is Life in all its manifestations"
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"It is not paradox to say that in our most theoretical moods we may be nearest to our most practical applications."
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"It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. This statement is almost a tautology. For the energy of operation of a proposition in an occasion of experience is its interest and is its importance. But of course a true proposition is more apt to be interesting than a false one."
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"The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanation of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be ``Seek simplicity and distrust it.''"
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"The teleology of the Universe is directed to the production of Beauty... The type of Truth required for the final stretch of Beauty is a discovery and not a recapitulation... Apart from Beauty, Truth is neither good, nor bad... Truth matters because of beauty."
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"The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation."
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"The power of Christianity lies in its revelation in act, of that which Plato divined in theory."
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"No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it."
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"Without doubt, if we are to go back to that ultimate, integral experience, unwarped by the sophistications of theory, that experience whose elucidation is the final aim of philosophy, the flux of things is one ultimate generalization around which we must weave our philosophical system."
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"No Roman ever died in contemplation over a geometrical diagram."
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"An open mind is all very well in its way, but it ought not to be so open that there is no keeping anything in or out of it."
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