Quote

There is no greater hindrance to the progress of thought than an attitude of irritated party-spirit.

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
Party
Spirit
Thought
Partisanship
Hindrance
Irritated
Progress
Attitude
Greater

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

Image
The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
Ninety percent of our lives is governed by emotion. Our brains merely register and act upon what is telegraphed to them by our bodily experience. Intellect is to emotion as our clothes are to our bodies we could not very well have civilized life without clothes, but we would be in a poor way if we had only clothes without bodies.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
...the only simplicity to be trusted is the simplicity to be found on the far side of complexity.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
Without adventure all civilization is full of decay. Adventure rarely reaches its predetermined end. Columbus never reached China.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
Everyone is a philosopher. Not everyone is good at it.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
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
Image
Vigorous societies harbour a certain extravagance of objectives.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
No man of science wants merely to know. He acquires knowledge to appease his passion for discovery. He does not discover in order to know, he knows in order to discover.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
Faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
The defense of morals is the battle-cry which best rallies stupidity against change.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
The only use of knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
Nature is probably quite indifferent to the aesthetic preferences of mathematicians.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
I put forward as a general definition of civilization, that a civilized society is exhibiting the five qualities of Truth, Beauty, Adventure, Art, Peace.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.
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
Disputing the commonsense notion that all events require the prior existence of some underlying matter or substance. There is no antecedent static cabinet.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
So far as the mere imparting of information is concerned, no university has had any justification for existence since the popularization of printing in the fifteenth century.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
No reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the ground of rationality.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
The ultimate metaphysical ground is the creative advance into novelty.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
To be an abstraction does not mean that an entity is nothing. It merely means that its existence is only a factor of a more concrete element of nature.
Alfred North Whitehead