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
inspirational thank-you wise
No one who achieves success does so without acknowledging the help of others. The wise and confident acknowledge this help with gratitude.
experience mature-love mature
An enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words.
life symbolism texture
Symbolism is no mere idle fancy or corrupt degeneration: it is inherent in the very texture of human life.
mean religion adherence
As society is now constituted, a literal adherence to the moral precepts scattered throughout the Gospels would mean sudden death.
religion doe individual
Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness.
life mother peace
The essence of Christianity is the appeal to the life of Christ as a revelation of the nature of God and of God's agency in the world. The record is fragmentary, inconsistent, and uncertain. . . . But there can be no doubt as to what elements in the record have evoked a response from all that is best in human nature. The Mother, the Child, and the bare manger: the lowly man, homeless and self-forgetful, with his message of peace, love, and sympathy: the suffering, the agony, the tender words as life ebbed, the final despair: and the whole with the authority of supreme victory.
ideas people effort
The ideas of Freud were popularized by people who only imperfectly understood them, who were incapable of the great effort required to grasp them in their relationship to larger truths, and who therefore assigned to them a prominence out of all proportion to their true importance.
learning race brain
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.
interesting important energy
It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. This statement is almost a tautology. For the energy of operation of a proposition in an occasion of experience is its interest and is its importance. But of course a true proposition is more apt to be interesting than a false one.
learning thinking machines
There is a technique, a knack, for thinking, just as there is for doing other things. You are not wholly at the mercy of your thoughts, any more than they are you. They are a machine you can learn to operate.
beauty art adventure
A general definition of civilization: a civilized society is exhibiting the fine qualities of truth, beauty, adventure, art, peace.
christian race religion
I consider Christian theology to be one of the greatest disasters of the human race.
ideas issues feelings
In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as it were a mist, cloaking the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions.
errors progress pay
Error is the price we pay for progress.