"After you understand about the sun and the stars and the rotation of the earth, you may still miss the radiance of the sunset."
Read quote
8 likes
Quote collection
Alfred North Whitehead quotes (page 5 of 17)
326 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Education with inert ideas is not only useless; it is above all things harmful."
Read quote
8 likes
"Learning is often spoken of as if we are watching the open pages of all the books which we have ever read, and then, when occasion arises, we select the right page to read aloud to the universe."
Read quote
8 likes
"Religion is what a person does in his solitariness."
Read quote
8 likes
"In the history of the world the prize has not gone to those species which specialized in methods of violence, or even in defensive armor. In fact, nature began with producing animals encased in hard shells for defense against the ill of life. But smaller animals, without external armor, warm-blooded, sensitive, alert, have cleared those monsters off the face of the earth."
Read quote
8 likes
"Value is coextensive with reality."
Read quote
8 likes
"The 'silly question' is the first intimation of some totally novel development."
Read quote
8 likes
"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."
Read quote
8 likes
"In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as it were a mist, cloaking the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions."
Read quote
8 likes
"Spoken language is merely a series of squeaks."
Read quote
8 likes
"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them."
Read quote
8 likes
"Algebra reverses the relative importance of the factors in ordinary language."
Read quote
8 likes
"Civilizations can only be understood by those who are civilized."
Read quote
8 likes
"A Unitarian is a person who believes in at most one God."
Read quote
8 likes
"Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions."
Read quote
8 likes
"The ultimate metaphysical ground is the creative advance into novelty."
Read quote
7 likes
"I consider Christian theology to be one of the great disasters of the human race."
Read quote
7 likes
"The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, seek simplicity and distrust it."
Read quote
7 likes
"Almost all new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced."
Read quote
7 likes
"You think the world is what it looks like in fine weather at noon day; I think it is what it seems like in the early morning when one first wakes from deep sleep."
Read quote
7 likes