Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead OM FRSwas an English mathematician and philosopher. He is best known as the defining figure of the philosophical school known as process philosophy, which today has found application to a wide variety of disciplines, including ecology, theology, education, physics, biology, economics, and psychology, among other areas...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionMathematician
Date of Birth15 February 1861
Alfred North Whitehead quotes about
life degenerates decent
Religion increasingly is tending to degenerate into a decent formula wherewith to embellish a comfortable life.
airplane discovery land
The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation.
adventure safety unattainable
The worship of God is not a rule of safety - it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable.
business danger fixed
The fixed person for the fixed duties who in older societies was such a godsend, in future will be a public danger.
truth heaven may
Heaven knows what seeming nonsense may not tomorrow be demonstrated truth.
adventure past civilization
Without adventure civilization is in full decay. ... The great fact [is] that in their day the great achievements of the past were the adventures of the past.
past holy-ground use
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.
stars disappointment father
The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment. . . . We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this greatest science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it.
men long may
It does not matter what men say in words, so long as their activities are controlled by settled instincts. The words may ultimately destroy the instincts; but until this has occurred, words do not count.
moving talking long
The point of mathematics is that in it we have always got rid of the particular instance, and even of any particular sorts of entities. So that for example, no mathematical truths apply merely to fish, or merely to stones, or merely to colours. So long as you are dealing with pure mathematics, you are in the realm of complete and absolute abstraction. . . . Mathematics is thought moving in the sphere of complete abstraction from any particular instance of what it is talking about.
character personality events
Every epoch has its character determined by the way its population reacts to the material events which they encounter.
adventure past greatness
The great achievements of the past were the adventures of the past. Only the adventurous can understand the greatness of the past.
greek firsts mathematics
Mathematics as a science, commenced when first someone, probably a Greek, proved propositions about "any" things or about "some" things, without specifications of definite particular things.
beauty discovery finals
The teleology of the Universe is directed to the production of Beauty... The type of Truth required for the final stretch of Beauty is a discovery and not a recapitulation... Apart from Beauty, Truth is neither good, nor bad... Truth matters because of beauty.