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Quote by Michael Bassey Johnson

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The Infinity Sign

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Michael Bassey Johnson

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“[Beware of] the fallacy of misplaced concreteness [mistaking an abstraction for concrete reality, for actuality] In the inescapable flux, there is something that abides; in the overwhelming permanence, there is an element that escapes into flux. Permanence can be snatched only out of flux; and the passing moment can find its adequate intensity only by its submission to permanence. Error is the price we pay for progress. In the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. The importance of truth is that it adds to interest. Creativity is the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact. It is that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively. It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity. The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations 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." It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious. [From various of Whitehead's books, not only PR]”

PhilosophyScienceCreativityCosmologyProcess PhilosophyAlfred North Whitehead
Book:Process and reality: an essay in cosmology
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“Black magic, the magic of the primeval chaos, blots out or transmogrifies the true form of things. At the stroke of twelve the princess must flee the banquet or risk discovery in the rags of a kitchen wench; coach reverts to pumpkin. Instability lies at the heart of the world. With uncanny foresight folklore has long toyed symbolically with what the nineteenth century was to proclaim a reality - namely, that form is an illusion of the time dimension, that the magic flight of the pursued hero or heroine through frogskin and wolf coat has been, and will continue to be, the flight of all men.”

LifeNatureEvolutionTransformationBiologyPaganProcess Philosophy
Book:The Star Thrower
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“Maybe women’s divinity wasn’t specific, but merely resided in the fact of their existence. Yes, yes, there was the truth: they existed more than other people, they were the symbol of the thing in the thing itself. And woman was mystery in itself, she discovered. There was in all of them a quality of raw material, something that might one day define itself but which was never realized, because its real essence was “becoming.” Wasn’t it precisely through this that the past was united with the future and with all times?”

BecomingWomanProcess PhilosophyClarice LispectorNear To The Wild Heart
Author:Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart
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“Descartes, reasoning unconsciously according to the prejudices of the old metaphysics, and seeking an unshakable foundation for philosophy, an aliquid inconcussum, as it was said, imagined that he had found it in the self, and posited this principle: I think, therefore I am; Cogito, ergo sum. Descartes did not realize that his base, supposedly immobile, was mobility itself. Cogito, I think—these words express movement; and the conclusion, according to the original sense of the verb to be, sum, ειναι, ou חיח, (haïah), is still movement. He should have said: Moveor, ergo fio, I move, therefore I become!”

DescartesProcess PhilosophyCogito
Book:The Philosophy of Progress
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“Ontology, as a science of substances and causes, is impossible; We know beings only by their relations: however, as it is necessary, for the needs of science, to distinguish in each of its aspects this great whole that we call the UNIVERSE, we have given special names to things known and unknown, to the visible and invisible, to those that we know and that we believe.”

OntologyProcess Philosophy
Book:The Philosophy of Progress
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