"It is the business of the future to be dangerous; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties."
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Alfred North Whitehead quotes (page 8 of 17)
326 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Whenever a text-book is written of real educational worth, you may be quite certain that some reviewer will say that it will be difficult to teach from it. Of course it will be difficult to teach from it. It it were easy, the book ought to be burned."
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"By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and in effect increases the mental power of the race."
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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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"But harmony is limitation. Thus rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality. Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing."
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"A race preserves its vigor so long as it harbors a real contrast between what has been and what may be; and so long as it is nerved by the vigor to adventure beyond the safeties of the past. Without adventure civilization is in full decay."
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"The English never abolish anything. They put it in cold storage."
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"In every age of well-marked transition, there is the pattern of habitual dumb practice and emotion which is passing and there is oncoming a new complex of habit."
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"It is the business of the future to be dangerous."
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"Speak out in acts; the time for words has passed, and only deeds will suffice."
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"We think of the number "five" as applying to appropriate groups of any entities whatsoever - to five fishes, five children, five apples, five days... We are merely thinking of those relationships between those two groups which are entirely independent of the individual essences of any of the members of either group. This is a very remarkable feat of abstraction; and it must have taken ages for the human race to rise to it"
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"No man of science wants merely to know. He acquires knowledge to appease his passion for discovery. He does not discover in order to know, he knows in order to discover."
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"Without adventure civilization is in full decay. ... The great fact [is] that in their day the great achievements of the past were the adventures of the past."
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"Knowledge is always accompanied with accessories of emotion and purpose."
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"From the moment of birth we are immersed in action, and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought."
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"There is no nature at an instant."
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"On the ostensible exactitude of certain branches of human knowledge, including mathematics. The exactness is a fake."
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"Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure, a sense of nothing having been done before, of complete freedom to experiment."
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"The real history does not get written, because it is not in people's brains but in their nerves and vitals."
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"It is the business of future to be dangerous.... The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur."
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