Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

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Alfred North Whitehead

Profession : Mathematician

Birth : February 15, 1861

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

Alfred North Whitehead

True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes, but the firm resolve of virtue and reason.

Alfred North Whitehead

Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language.

Alfred North Whitehead

Knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows.

Alfred North Whitehead

Wisdom alone is true ambition's aim, wisdom is the source of virtue and of fame; obtained with labour, for mankind employed, and then, when most you share it, best enjoyed.

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.

Alfred North Whitehead

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.

Alfred North Whitehead

Fools act on imagination without knowledge, pedants act on knowledge without imagination.

Alfred North Whitehead

Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.

Alfred North Whitehead

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.

Alfred North Whitehead

Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.

Alfred North Whitehead

The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.

Alfred North Whitehead

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.

Alfred North Whitehead

Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.

Alfred North Whitehead

We think in generalities, but we live in detail.

Alfred North Whitehead

Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.

Alfred North Whitehead

Seek simplicity but distrust it.

Alfred North Whitehead

It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious.

Alfred North Whitehead

Familiar things happen, and mankind does not bother about them. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

Alfred North Whitehead

It is the business of the future to be dangerous; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties.

Alfred North Whitehead