Quote

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

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
Intelligent
Capacity
Wise
Apprehended
Ability
Apprehend
Form
Quickness
Thing
Wisely
Distinct
Intelligence

More quotes by 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
The term many presupposes the term one , and the term one presupposes the term many.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
But in the prevalent discussion of classes, there are illegitimate transitions to the notions of a 'nexus' and of a 'proposition'. The appeal to a class to perform the services of a proper entity is exactly analogous to an appeal to an imaginary terrier to kill a real rat. Process and Reality
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
Without adventure civilization is in full decay.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
One and one make two assumes that the changes in the shift of circumstance are unimportant. But it is impossible for us to analyze this notion of unimportant change.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
The human body is an instrument for the production of art in the life of the human soul.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it. A merely well informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
Rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
...the self-satisfied dogmatism with which mankind at each period of its history cherishes the delusion of the finality of existing modes of knowledge.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
You cannot evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music, and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves.
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
Apart from God every activity is merely a passing whiff of insignificance.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
Every intellectual revolution which has ever stirred humanity into greatness has been a passionate protest against inert ideas. Then, alas, with pathetic ignorance of human psychology, it has proceeded by some educational scheme to bind humanity afresh with inert ideas of its own fashioning.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
The foundations of the world are to be found, not in the cognitive experience of conscious thought, but in the aesthetic experience of everyday life.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
Nobody has a right to speak more clearly than he thinks.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
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
Image
Religion is the reaction of human nature to its search for God.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
Whenever a text-book is written of real educational worth, you may be quite certain that some reviewer will say that it will be difficult to teach from it. Of course it will be difficult to teach from it. It it were easy, the book ought to be burned.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment... We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this great science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
The teleology of the Universe is directed to the production of Beauty... The type of Truth required for the final stretch of Beauty is a discovery and not a recapitulation... Apart from Beauty, Truth is neither good, nor bad... Truth matters because of beauty.
Alfred North Whitehead