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
past use-it-or-lose-it use-of-knowledge
The only use of knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present.
book thinking opposites
It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.
imagination way facts
Imagination is not to be divorced from the facts. It is a way of illuminating the facts.
cutting play ideas
I will not go so far as to say that to construct a history of thought without profound study of the mathematical ideas of successive epochs is like omitting Hamlet from the play which is named after him. That would be claiming too much. But it is certainly analogous to cutting out the part of Ophelia. This simile is singularly exact. For Ophelia is quite essential to the play, she is very charming . . . and a little mad.
math organization imagination
The whole of mathematics consists in the organization of a series of aids to the imagination in the process of reasoning.
success education opportunity
A clash of doctrine is not a disaster, it is an opportunity.
science forget lost
A science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost.
science half creation
Aristotle discovered all the half-truths which were necessary to the creation of science.
angel science games
Without deductive logic science would be entirely useless. It is merely a barren game to ascend from the particular to the general, unless afterwards we can reverse the process and descend from the general to the particular, ascending and descending like angels on Jacob's ladder.
type rescue preoccupation
I am also greatly indebted to Bergson, William James, and John Dewey. One of my preoccupations has been to rescue their type of thought from the charge of anti-intellectualism, which rightly or wrongly has been associated with it.
dream dreamer fulfilled
Great dreamers' dreams are never fulfilled, they are always transcended.
ideas perfection belief
In modern times the belief that the ultimate explanation of all things was to be found in Newtonian mechanics was an adumbration of the truth that all science, as it grows towards perfection, becomes mathematical in its ideas.
civilization civilized understood
Civilizations can only be understood by those who are civilized.
fashion teacher teaching
I am sure that one secret of a successful teacher is that he has formulated quite clearly in his mind what the pupil has got to know in precise fashion. He will then cease from half-hearted attempts to worry his pupils with memorizing a lot of irrelevant stuff of inferior importance.