Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Alfred North Whitehead
Age: 86 †
Born: 1861
Born: February 15
Died: 1947
Died: December 30
Mathematician
Philosopher
Physicist
Theologian
Writer
Ramsgate
Kent
Wisdom
Knowledge
Future
Use
Equip
Past
Contains
Ground
Holy
Present
More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead
What the learned world tends to offer is one second-hand scrap of information illustrating ideas derived from another second-hand scrap of information. The second-handedness of the learned world is the secret of its mediocrity.
Alfred North Whitehead
Knowledge is always accompanied with accessories of emotion and purpose.
Alfred North Whitehead
It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.
Alfred North Whitehead
The aims of scientific thought are to see the general in the particular and the eternal in the transitory.
Alfred North Whitehead
After you understand about the sun and the stars and the rotation of the earth, you may still miss the radiance of the sunset.
Alfred North Whitehead
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
Vigorous societies harbor a certain extravagance of objectives, so that men wander beyond the safe provision of personal gratifications.
Alfred North Whitehead
Value is coextensive with reality.
Alfred North Whitehead
Every really new idea looks crazy at first.
Alfred North Whitehead
The preternatural solemnity of a good many of the professionally religious is to me a point against them.
Alfred North Whitehead
I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning, or destroyed it altogether.
Alfred North Whitehead
It must be admitted that there is a degree of instability which is inconsistent with civilization. But, on the whole, the great ages have been unstable ages.
Alfred North Whitehead
In every age of well-marked transition, there is the pattern of habitual dumb practice and emotion which is passing and there is oncoming a new complex of habit.
Alfred North Whitehead
Knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows.
Alfred North Whitehead
True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes, but the firm resolve of virtue and reason.
Alfred North Whitehead
Without adventure all civilization is full of decay. Adventure rarely reaches its predetermined end. Columbus never reached China.
Alfred North Whitehead
There is no more common error than to assume that, because prolonged and accurate mathematical calculations have been made, the application of the result to some fact of nature is absolutely certain.
Alfred North Whitehead
I am also greatly indebted to Bergson, William James, and John Dewey. One of my preoccupations has been to rescue their type of thought from the charge of anti-intellectualism, which rightly or wrongly has been associated with it.
Alfred North Whitehead
Routine is the god of every social system it is the seventh heaven of business, the essential component in the success of every factory, the ideal of every statesman. The social machine should run like clockwork.
Alfred North Whitehead
Each generation criticizes the unconscious assumptions made by its parent. It may assent to them, but it brings them out in the open.
Alfred North Whitehead
