Quote

Common sense is genius in homespun.

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
Homespun
Genius
Common
Sense

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

Image
Nobody has a right to speak more clearly than he thinks.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are cavalry charges in a battle - they are limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
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
Image
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.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
War can protect it cannot create.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
Above all things we must be aware of what I will call 'inert ideas' - that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilized, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
Philosophy asks the simple question: What is it all about?
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
The factor in human life provocative of a noble discontent is the gradual emergence of a sense of criticism, founded upon appreciation of beauty, and of intellectual distinction, and of duty.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
Vedanta is the most impressive metaphysics the human mind has conceived.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
Every organism requires an environment of friends, partly to shield it from violent changes, and partly to supply it with its wants.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
The future belongs to those who can rise above the confines of the earth.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
Mathematics, in its widest significance, is the development of all types of formal, necessary, deductive reasoning.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
No religion can be considered in abstraction from its followers, or even from its various types of followers.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
Seek simplicity, then distrust.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
The whole of mathematics consists in the organization of a series of aids to the imagination in the process of reasoning.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
Fertilization of the soul is the reason for the necessity of art.
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
We must produce a great age, or see the collapse of the upward striving of our race.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
It is this union of passionate interest in the detailed facts with equal devotion to abstract generalisation which forms the novelty in our present society .
Alfred North Whitehead