Alfred North Whitehead quotes - page 2

Nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent, the nightingale for its song; and the sun for its radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves and should turn them into odes of self congratulation on the excellence of the human mind. (Alfred North Whitehead)
The term many presupposes the term one, and the term one presupposes the term many. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
No one who achieves success does so without acknowledging the help of others. The wise and confident acknowledge this help with gratitude. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
Error is the price we pay for progress. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
Life is complex in its expression, involving more than percipience, namely desire, emotion, will, and feeling. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
The oneness of the universe, and the oneness of each element of the universe, repeat themselves to the crack of doom in the creative advance from creature to creature, each creature including in itself the whole of history and exemplifying the self-identity of things and their mutual diversities. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
The chief error in philosophy is overstatement. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
Intolerance is the besetting sin of moral fervour. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
Rationalism is an adventure in the clarification of thought. (Alfred North Whitehead)
With the sense of sight, the idea communicates the emotion, whereas, with sound, the emotion communicates the idea, which is more direct and therefore more powerful. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
Without doubt, if we are to go back to that ultimate, integral experience, unwarped by the sophistications of theory, that experience whose elucidation is the final aim of philosophy, the flux of things is one ultimate generalization around which we must weave our philosophical system. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
The chief danger to philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning, or destroyed it altogether. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
The fact of the religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
The main importance of Francis Bacon's influence does not lie in any peculiar theory of inductive reasoning which he happened to express, but in the revolt against second-hand information of which he was a leader. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
Our habitual experience is a complex of failure and success in the enterprise of interpretation. If we desire a record of uninterpreted experience, we must ask a stone to record its autobiography. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
The English never abolish anything. They put it in cold storage. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
But you can catch yourself entertaining habitually certain ideas and setting others aside; and that, I think, is where our personal destinies are largely decided. (Alfred North Whitehead)
Shakespeare wrote better poetry for not knowing too much; Milton, I think, knew too much finally for the good of his poetry. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
What the learned world tends to offer is one second-hand scrap of information illustrating ideas derived from another second-hand scrap of information. The second-handedness of the learned world is the secret of its mediocrity. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
A man really writes for an audience of about ten persons. Of course if others like it, that is clear gain. But if those ten are satisfied, he is content. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
A philosopher of imposing stature doesn't think in a vacuum. Even his most abstract ideas are, to some extent, conditioned by what is or is not known in the time when he lives. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead