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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

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Alfred North Whitehead
Age: 86 †
Born: 1861
Born: February 15
Died: 1947
Died: December 30
Mathematician
Philosopher
Physicist
Theologian
Writer
Ramsgate
Kent
Environment
Shields
Wants
Partly
Friends
Organisms
Every
Supply
Requires
Violent
Changes
Shield
Friendship
Organism

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

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If you have had your attention directed to the novelties in thought in your own lifetime, you will have observed that almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced, and almost any idea which jogs you out of your current abstractions may be better than nothing.
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To come very near to a true theory, and to grasp its precise application, are two different things, as the history of science teaches us. Everything of importance has been said before by someone who did not discover it.
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Not a sentence or a word is independent of the circumstances under which it is uttered.
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Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.
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It belongs to the self-respect of intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final unravelment.
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The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.
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In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory.
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The worship of God is not a rule of safety - it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable.
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We must produce a great age, or see the collapse of the upward striving of our race.
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No Roman ever died in contemplation over a geometrical diagram.
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Without doubt, if we are to go back to that ultimate, integral experience, unwarped by the sophistications of theory, that experience whose elucidation is the final aim of philosophy, the flux of things is one ultimate generalization around which we must weave our philosophical system.
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God is in the world, or nowhere, creating continually in us and around us. Insofar as man partakes of this creative process does he partake of the divine, of God, and that participation is his immortality.
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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.
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Rationalism is an adventure in the clarification of thought.
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By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and in effect increases the mental power of the race.
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Everyone is a philosopher. Not everyone is good at it.
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Error is the price we pay for progress.
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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.
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The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment.
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The ideas of Freud were popularized by people who only imperfectly understood them, who were incapable of the great effort required to grasp them in their relationship to larger truths, and who therefore assigned to them a prominence out of all proportion to their true importance.
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