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
courage travel adventure
The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervor, live for it, and if need be, die for it.
inspirational truth science
There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays to the devil.
real knowledge science
In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory.
doe penalties periods
No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it.
power use force
The only justification in the use of force is to reduce the amount of force necessary to be used.
numbers poetry-and-music may
You cannot evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music, and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves.
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.