Quotes by
Alfred North Whitehead |
1861-1947 , British philosopher & mathematician
English mathematician and philosopher who collaborated with Bertrand Russell on Principia Mathematica (1910–13) and, from the mid-1920s, taught at Harvard University and developed a comprehensive metaphysical theory. | 22 quotes | 2,891 visits |
Quotations
| • | The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention. 10 |
| • | Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance is the death of knowledge. 8 |
| • | A general definition of civilization: a civilized society is exhibiting the five qualities of truth, beauty, adventure, art, peace. 7 |
| • | The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order. 7 |
| • | When you're average, you're just as close to the bottom as you are the top. 6 |
| • | Religion is the last refuge of human savagery. 5 |
| • | It is the first step in sociological wisdom, to recognize that the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur. 5 |
| • | Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas. 5 |
| • | Nobody has a right to speak more clearly than he thinks. 5 |
| • | We think in generalities, but we live in detail. 5 |
| • | If a dog jumps into your lap, it is because he is fond of you; but if a cat does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer. 4 |
| • | Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains. 4 |
| • | The point about zero is that we do not need to use it in the operation of daily life. No one goes out to buy zero fish. 4 |
| • | The mentality of mankind and the language of mankind created each other. 4 |
| • | Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilisation of knowledge. 4 |
| • | It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious. 4 |
| • | It is a safe rule to apply that, when a mathematical or philosophical author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense. 4 |
| • | Seek simplicity, and distrust it. 3 |
| • | Education which is not modern share the fate of all organic things which are kept too long. 3 |
| • | Shakespeare wrote better poetry for not knowing too much; Milton, I think, knew too much finally for the good of his poetry. 3 |
| • | There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil. 3 |
| • | The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. 3 |
