Best 303 quotes of Alfred North Whitehead on MyQuotes

Alfred North Whitehead

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    Alfred North Whitehead

    Above all things we must be aware of what I will call 'inert ideas' - that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilized, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations.

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    Alfred North Whitehead

    A clash of doctrine is not a disaster, it is an opportunity.

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    Alfred North Whitehead

    A culture is in its finest flower before it begins to analyze itself.

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    Alfred North Whitehead

    After you understand about the sun and the stars and the rotation of the earth, you may still miss the radiance of the sunset.

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    Alfred North Whitehead

    A great society is a society in which its men of business think greatly of their functions.

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    Alfred North Whitehead

    Algebra is the intellectual instrument which has been created for rendering clear the quantitative aspects of the world.

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    Alfred North Whitehead

    Algebra reverses the relative importance of the factors in ordinary language.

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    Alfred North Whitehead

    Algebra reverses the relative importance of the factors in ordinary language. It is essentially a written language, and it endeavors to exemplify in its written structures the patterns which it is its purpose to convey. The pattern of the marks on paper is a particular instance of the pattern to be conveyed to thought. The algebraic method is our best approach to the expression of necessity, by reason of its reduction of accident to the ghostlike character of the real variable.

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    Alfred North Whitehead

    All practical teachers know that education is a patient process of mastery of details, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day.

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    Alfred North Whitehead

    Almost all new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.

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    Alfred North Whitehead

    A man really writes for an audience of about ten persons. Of course if others like it, that is clear gain. But if those ten are satisfied, he is content.

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    Alfred North Whitehead

    An enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words.

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    Alfred North Whitehead

    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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    Alfred North Whitehead

    An unflinching determination to take the whole evidence into account is the only method of preservation against the fluctuating extremes of fashionable opinion.

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    Alfred North Whitehead

    Apart from blunt truth, our lives sink decadently amid the perfume of hints and suggestions.

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    Alfred North Whitehead

    Apart from God every activity is merely a passing whiff of insignificance.

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    Alfred North Whitehead

    A philosopher of imposing stature doesn't think in a vacuum. Even his most abstract ideas are, to some extent, conditioned by what is or is not known in the time when he lives.

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    Alfred North Whitehead

    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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    Alfred North Whitehead

    Aristotle discovered all the half-truths which were necessary to the creation of science.

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    Alfred North Whitehead

    Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

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    Alfred North Whitehead

    Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure.

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    Alfred North Whitehead

    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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    Alfred North Whitehead

    Art heightens the sense of humanity. It gives an elation to feeling which is supernatural...A million sunsets will not spur us on towards civilization. It requires Art to evoke into consciousness the finite perfections which lie ready for human achievement.

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    Alfred North Whitehead

    Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience.

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    Alfred North Whitehead

    A science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost.

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    Alfred North Whitehead

    As society is now constituted, a literal adherence to the moral precepts scattered throughout the Gospels would mean sudden death.

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    Alfred North Whitehead

    A Unitarian is a person who believes in at most one God.

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    Alfred North Whitehead

    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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    Alfred North Whitehead

    But in the prevalent discussion of classes, there are illegitimate transitions to the notions of a 'nexus' and of a 'proposition'. The appeal to a class to perform the services of a proper entity is exactly analogous to an appeal to an imaginary terrier to kill a real rat. Process and Reality

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    Alfred North Whitehead

    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.

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    Alfred North Whitehead

    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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    Alfred North Whitehead

    Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are cavalry charges in a battle - they are limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.

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    Alfred North Whitehead

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

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    Alfred North Whitehead

    Civilizations can only be understood by those who are civilized.

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    Alfred North Whitehead

    Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it. A merely well informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth.

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    Alfred North Whitehead

    Democracy...is a society in which the unbeliever feels undisturbed and at home. If there were only a half dozen unbelievers in America, their well-being would be a test of our democracy.

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    Alfred North Whitehead

    Disputing the commonsense notion that all events require the prior existence of some underlying matter or substance. There is no antecedent static cabinet.

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    Alfred North Whitehead

    Dogmatism is the anti-Christ of learning.

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    Alfred North Whitehead

    Each human being is a more complex structure than any social system to which he belongs.

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    Alfred North Whitehead

    Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilisation of knowledge.

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    Alfred North Whitehead

    Education should turn out the pupil with something he knows well and something he can do well.

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    Alfred North Whitehead

    Education which is not modern share the fate of all organic things which are kept too long.

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    Alfred North Whitehead

    Education with inert ideas is not only useless; it is above all things harmful.

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    Alfred North Whitehead

    Error itself may be happy chance.

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    Alfred North Whitehead

    Every epoch has its character determined by the way its population reacts to the material events which they encounter.

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    Alfred North Whitehead

    Every intellectual revolution which has ever stirred humanity into greatness has been a passionate protest against inert ideas. Then, alas, with pathetic ignorance of human psychology, it has proceeded by some educational scheme to bind humanity afresh with inert ideas of its own fashioning.

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    Alfred North Whitehead

    Every organism requires an environment of friends, partly to shield it from violent changes, and partly to supply it with its wants.

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    Alfred North Whitehead

    Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning.

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    Alfred North Whitehead

    Every really new idea looks crazy at first.

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    Alfred North Whitehead

    Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.