The task of a university is the creation of the future, so far as rational thought and civilized modes of appreciation can affect the issue.
quote by Alfred North Whitehead
Added by Lucian Velea
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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.
quote by 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.
quote by Alfred North Whitehead
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Let us grant that the pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit, a refuge from the goading urgency of contingent happenings.
quote by Alfred North Whitehead
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In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory.
quote by 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.
quote by Alfred North Whitehead
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Wisdom alone is true ambition's aim, wisdom is the source of virtue and of fame; obtained with labour, for mankind employed, and then, when most you share it, best enjoyed.
quote by 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.
quote by Alfred North Whitehead
Added by Lucian Velea
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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.
quote by Alfred North Whitehead
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Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of life is to grasp as much as we can out of that infinitude.
quote by Alfred North Whitehead
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