Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Alfred North Whitehead
Age: 86 †
Born: 1861
Born: February 15
Died: 1947
Died: December 30
Mathematician
Philosopher
Physicist
Theologian
Writer
Ramsgate
Kent
High
Motives
History
Penalties
Doe
Aside
Ever
Paying
Shoved
Great
Motive
Idealistic
Time
Period
Idealist
Periods
Penalty
Sort
Idealism

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

Image
It is impossible to meditate on time and the mystery of nature without an overwhelming emotion at the limitations of human intelligence.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
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.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
In all education the main cause of failure is staleness.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
Thus the negative perception is the triumph of consciousness.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes, but the firm resolve of virtue and reason.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
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.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
The only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present. The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground for it is the past, and it is the future.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
A Unitarian is a person who believes in at most one God.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
When you're average, you're just as close to the bottom as you are the top.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
Rationalism is an adventure in the clarification of thought.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, seek simplicity and distrust it.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
Error itself may be happy chance.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
Not a sentence or a word is independent of the circumstances under which it is uttered.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
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.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
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