Alfred North Whitehead quotes - page 7

Apart from blunt truth, our lives sink decadently amid the perfume of hints and suggestions. (Alfred North Whitehead)
War can protect it cannot create. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
The new tinge to modern minds is a vehement and passionate interest in the relation of general principles to irreducible and stubborn facts. All the world over and at all times there have been practical men, absorbed in 'irreducible and stubborn facts'; all the world over and at all times there have been men of philosophic temperament, who have been absorbed in the weaving of general principles. It is this union of passionate interest in the detailed facts with equal devotion to abstract generalisation which forms the novelty of our present society. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
I regret that it has been necessary for me in this lecture to administer a large dose of four-dimensional geometry. I do not apologize, because I am really not responsible for the fact that nature in its most fundamental aspect is four-dimensional. Things are what they are. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
Algebra reverses the relative importance of the factors in ordinary language. It is essentially a written language, and it endeavors to exemplify in its written structures the patterns which it is its purpose to convey. The pattern of the marks on paper is a particular instance of the pattern to be conveyed to thought. The algebraic method is our best approach to the expression of necessity, by reason of its reduction of accident to the ghostlike character of the real variable. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
The point of mathematics is that in it we have always got rid of the particular instance, and even of any particular sorts of entities. So that for example, no mathematical truths apply merely to fish, or merely to stones, or merely to colours. So long as you are dealing with pure mathematics, you are in the realm of complete and absolute abstraction.... Mathematics is thought moving in the sphere of complete abstraction from any particular instance of what it is talking about. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
The defense of morals is the battle-cry which best rallies stupidity against change. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
Through and through the world is infested with quantity To talk sense is to talk quantities. It is no use saying the nation is large.... How large It is no use saying the radium is scarce.... How scarce You cannot evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music, and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
Algebra is the intellectual instrument which has been created for rendering clear the quantitative aspects of the world. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
It is the business of the future to be dangerous. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
There is no nature at an instant. (Alfred North Whitehead)
To be an abstraction does not mean that an entity is nothing. It merely means that its existence is only a factor of a more concrete element of nature. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
The race that does not value trained intelligence is doomed. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
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. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
Now in creative thought common sense is a bad master. Its sole criterion for judgement is that the new ideas shall look like the old ones. In other words it can only work by suppressing originality. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
Mathematics as a science, commenced when first someone, probably a Greek, proved propositions about 'any' things or about 'some' things, without specifications of definite particular things. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
On the ostensible exactitude of certain branches of human knowledge, including mathematics The exactness is a fake. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
In many circumstances, the most important thing about a proposition is not that it be true, but that it be interesting. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
A clash of doctrines is not a disaster--it is an opportunity. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
Consciousness is only the last and greatest of such elements by which the selective character of the individual obscures the external totality from which it originates and which it embodies. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
More and more it is becoming evident that what the West can most readily give to the East is its science and its scientific outlook. (Alfred North Whitehead)
The universities are schools of education, and schools of research. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as if 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. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
Religion is an ultimate craving to infuse into the insistent particularity of emotion that non-temporal generality which primarily belongs to conceptual thought alone. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead