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
development mathematics type
Mathematics, in its widest significance, is the development of all types of formal, necessary, deductive reasoning.
art acquisition
Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilisation of knowledge.
premises straws floats
Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions.
religious doe individual
Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness. Thus religion is solitariness; and if you are never solitary, you are never religious.
morning sleep thinking
You think the world is what it looks like in fine weather at noon day; I think it is what it seems like in the early morning when one first wakes from deep sleep.
believe unitarian persons
A Unitarian is a person who believes in at most one God.
writing garden order
In England if something goes wrong--say, if one finds a skunk in the garden--he writes to the family solicitor, who proceeds to take the proper measures; whereas in America, you telephone the fire department. Each satisfies a characteristic need; in the English, love of order and legalistic procedure; and here in America, what you like is something vivid, and red, and swift.
adventure mean order
In a living civilization there is always an element of unrest, for sensitiveness to ideas means curiosity, adventure, change. Civilized order survives on its merits and is transformed by its power of recognizing its imperfections.
ideas may firsts
If you have had your attention directed to the novelties in thought in your own lifetime, you will have observed that almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced, and almost any idea which jogs you out of your current abstractions may be better than nothing.
life past emotion
Life is the enjoyment of emotion, derived from the past and aimed at the future.
thinking speech speak
Nobody has a right to speak more clearly than he thinks.
success race age
We must produce a great age, or see the collapse of the upward striving of our race.
simplicity statistics facts
The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanation of complex facts... Seek simplicity and distrust it.
past length-of-life progress
Our rate of progress is such that an individual human being, of ordinary length of life, will be called on to face novel situations which find no parallel in his past. The fixed person, for the fixed duties, who, in older societies was such a godsend, in the future will be a public danger.