Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
[In many circumstances,] the most important thing about a proposition is not that it be true, but that it be interesting.
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
True
Many
Important
Thing
Proposition
Propositions
Circumstances
Interesting
More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead
With the sense of sight, the idea communicates the emotion, whereas, with sound, the emotion communicates the idea, which is more direct and therefore more powerful.
Alfred North Whitehead
Knowledge is always accompanied with accessories of emotion and purpose.
Alfred North Whitehead
It is the business of future to be dangerous.... The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur.
Alfred North Whitehead
Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of life is to grasp as much as we can out of that infinitude.
Alfred North Whitehead
Knowledge does not keep any better than fish.
Alfred North Whitehead
Nature, even in the act of satisfying anticipation, often provides a surprise.
Alfred North Whitehead
The main importance of Francis Bacon's influence does not lie in any peculiar theory of inductive reasoning which he happened to express, but in the revolt against second-hand information of which he was a leader.
Alfred North Whitehead
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
The mentality of mankind and the language of mankind created each other. If we like to assume the rise of language as a given fact, then it is not going too far to say that the souls of men are the gift from language to mankind. The account of the sixth day should be written: He gave them speech, and they became souls.
Alfred North Whitehead
Great people plant trees they'll never sit under.
Alfred North Whitehead
I consider Christianity to be one of the great disasters of the human race... It would be impossible to imagine anything more un - Christianlike than theology.
Alfred North Whitehead
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
Education should turn out the pupil with something he knows well and something he can do well.
Alfred North Whitehead
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.
Alfred North Whitehead
Seek simplicity but distrust it.
Alfred North Whitehead
On the ostensible exactitude of certain branches of human knowledge, including mathematics. The exactness is a fake.
Alfred North Whitehead
Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.
Alfred North Whitehead
It is the business of the future to be dangerous and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties.
Alfred North Whitehead
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
Life is complex in its expression, involving more than percipience, namely desire, emotion, will, and feeling.
Alfred North Whitehead
