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Nothing is more impressive than the fact that as mathematics withdrew increasingly into the upper regions of ever greater extremes of abstract thought, it returned back to earth with a corresponding growth of importance for the analysis of concrete fact. ...The paradox is now fully established that the utmost abstractions are the true weapons with which to control our thought of concrete fact.

— Alfred North Whitehead Science and the Modern World (1925)

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Mathematics

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

In all philosophic theory there is an ultimate which is actual in virtue of its accidents.

Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)

Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.

Adventures of Ideas (1933)

No reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the ground of all rationality.

Science and the Modern World (1925)

The human body is an instrument for the production of art in the life of the human soul.

Adventures of Ideas (1933)

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

An Introduction to Mathematics (1911)

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Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

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If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: infinite.

William Blake The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790)

Pure mathematics consists entirely of assertions to the effect that, if such and such a proposition is true of anything, then such and such another proposition is true of that thing.

Bertrand Russell

The land of easy mathematics where he who works adds up and he who retires subtracts.

Núria Añó

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Alfred North Whitehead (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.