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Alfred North Whitehead

Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

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Famous Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

“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.”

MenWorldLifeHumansChildrenSelfWholeMotherSufferingPeaceChristChristianityDoubtRecordsHuman NatureVictoryDespairAuthorityElementsMessagesEssenceResponseFinalsSupremeAppealsAgencyNo DoubtRevelationsAgonyUncertainHomelessInconsistentForgetfulPeace Love
Author:Alfred North Whitehead
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“It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. This statement is almost a tautology. For the energy of operation of a proposition in an occasion of experience is its interest and is its importance. But of course a true proposition is more apt to be interesting than a false one.”

ImportantCoursesEnergyInterestInterestingExperienceImportanceMathematicsMathStatementsBeing TrueOccasionsMathematicalOperationsPropositionsTautology
Author:Alfred North Whitehead
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“In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as 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. Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions.”

HumansIdeasHardFactsFeelingsRememberStudyIssuesCostFunctionMathematicsMathClarityMathematicalReasoningSuperstitionsSheerSentimentalFloatsMistPremisesStrawsInsistenceDeductionsHuman IntelligencePerplexity
Book:Adventures of Ideas
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“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.”

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Author:Alfred North Whitehead
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“The progress of Science consists in observing interconnections and in showing with a patient ingenuity that the events of this ever-shifting world are but examples of a few general relations, called laws. To see what is general in what is particular, and what is permanent in what is transitory, is the aim of scientific thought.”

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Book:An Introduction to Mathematics
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“The way in which the persecution of Galileo has been remembered is a tribute to the quiet commencement of the most intimate change in outlook which the human race had yet encountered. Since a babe was born in a manger, it may be doubted whether so great a thing has happened with so little stir”

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Book:Science and the Modern World
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“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.”

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Book:Aims of Education
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“There are two principles inherent in the very nature of things, recurring in some particular embodiments whatever field we explore - the spirit of change, and the spirit of conservation. There can be nothing real without both. Mere change without conservation is a passage from nothing to nothing. . . . Mere conservation without change cannot conserve. For after all, there is a flux of circumstance, and the freshness of being evaporates under mere repetition.”

TwoRealSpiritChangePrinciplesFieldsParticularCircumstancesMerePassagesInherentConservationRepetitionEmbodimentFreshnessFluxRecurring
Book:Science and the Modern World
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