Top 100 Jef Whitehead Quotes
#1. The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervor, live for it, and if need be, die for it.
Alfred North Whitehead
#2. Life! What Inscrutable Card Shall Ye Throw Next Upon the Soft Felt of Our Days?
Colson Whitehead
#3. Art heightens the sense of humanity. It gives an elation to feeling which is supernatural ... A million sunsets will not spur us on towards civilization. It requires Art to evoke into consciousness the finite perfections which lie ready for human achievement.
Alfred North Whitehead
#4. No reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the ground of rationality.
Alfred North Whitehead
#5. I feel about my phone the way horror-movie ventriloquists feel about their dummies: It's smarter than me, better than me, and I will kill anyone who comes between us.
Colson Whitehead
#8. Each generation criticizes the unconscious assumptions made by its parent. It may assent to them, but it brings them out in the open.
Alfred North Whitehead
#10. Stolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood.
Colson Whitehead
#11. Apart from blunt truth, our lives sink decadently amid the perfume of hints and suggestions.
Alfred North Whitehead
#12. 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
#13. I was inspired to become a writer by horror movies and science fiction.
Colson Whitehead
#14. In death the negro became a human being. Only then was he the white man's equal. On
Colson Whitehead
#15. Democracy ... is a society in which the unbeliever feels undisturbed and at home. If there were only a half dozen unbelievers in America, their well-being would be a test of our democracy.
Alfred North Whitehead
#17. It belongs to the self-respect of intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final unravelment.
Alfred North Whitehead
#19. Two white men in two days had their hands around her. Was this a condition of her freedom? Caesar
Colson Whitehead
#20. From the very beginning of his education, the child should experience the joy of discovery.
Alfred North Whitehead
#21. No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it.
Alfred North Whitehead
#22. The result of teaching small parts of a large number of subjects is the passive reception of disconnected ideas, not illumed with any spark of vitality.
Alfred North Whitehead
#23. Each human being is a more complex structure than any social system to which he belongs.
Alfred North Whitehead
#25. Religion increasingly is tending to degenerate into a decent formula wherewith to embellish a comfortable life.
Alfred North Whitehead
#27. I try not to pass judgment on anyone, and I wish they wouldn't pass it on me.
Mary Beth Whitehead
#28. Tipple sold his success much more effectively than he did. How to get excited about, take pride in something that came so naturally? It was like being honored for breathing.
Colson Whitehead
#29. Rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality.
Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing. The limitation, and the basis arising from what is already actual, are both of them necessary and interconnected.
Alfred North Whitehead
#30. The vastest knowledge of today cannot transcend the buddhi of the Rishis in ancient India; and science in its most advanced stage now is closer to Vedanta than ever before.
Alfred North Whitehead
#31. Did you know that smiling politely burns up the same amount of calories as speaking your mind.
Colson Whitehead
#32. Every intellectual revolution which has ever stirred humanity into greatness has been a passionate protest against inert ideas. Then, alas, with pathetic ignorance of human psychology, it has proceeded by some educational scheme to bind humanity afresh with inert ideas of its own fashioning.
Alfred North Whitehead
#33. At ninety, everything is air and the difference between you and the medium of your passage is disintegrating with every increment of the ascension.
Colson Whitehead
#35. Pick your fights like you pick your nose: with complete awareness of where you are.
Colson Whitehead
#36. Education should turn out the pupil with something he knows well and something he can do well.
Alfred North Whitehead
#39. The self-satisfied dogmatism with which mankind at each period of its history cherishes the delusion of the finality of existing modes of knowledge.
Alfred North Whitehead
#41. True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes, but the firm resolve of virtue and reason.
Alfred North Whitehead
#42. The city knows you better than any living person because it has seen you when you are alone.
Colson Whitehead
#43. We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them.
Colson Whitehead
#44. The absolute pacifist is a bad citizen; times come when force must be used to uphold right, justice and ideals.
Alfred North Whitehead
#45. All he felt now was envy. These people had expectations. Of the world, of the future, it didn't matter
expectation was such an innovative concept to him that he couldn't help but be a bit moved by what they were saying. Whatever that was.
Colson Whitehead
#46. It builds cathedrals before the workmen have moved a stone, and it destroys them before the elements have worn down their arches. It is the architect of the buildings of the spirit, and it is also their solvent: - and the spiritual precedes the material.
Alfred North Whitehead
#47. On the ostensible exactitude of certain branches of human knowledge, including mathematics. The exactness is a fake.
Alfred North Whitehead
#48. He told her that every one of her enemies, all the masters and overseers of her suffering, would be punished, if not in this world then the next, for justice may be slow and invisible, but it always renders its true verdict in the end.
Colson Whitehead
#50. The only simplicity to be trusted is the simplicity to be found on the far side of complexity.
Alfred North Whitehead
#51. In the dank utility room deep in the subbasements of my personality, a little man wiped his hands on his overalls and pulled the switch: More.
Colson Whitehead
#52. The old woman had destroyed his family so thoroughly it couldn't have been accidental. It wasn't her niece's greed - the old woman had played a trick on them the whole time.
Colson Whitehead
#53. The whole of mathematics consists in the organization of a series of aids to the imagination in the process of reasoning.
Alfred North Whitehead
#54. Cherish your old apartments and pause for a moment when you pass them. Pay tribute, for they are the caretakers for your reinventions.
Colson Whitehead
#55. The fixed person for the fixed duties who in older societies was such a godsend, in future will be a public danger.
Alfred North Whitehead
#56. A man really writes for an audience of about ten persons. Of course if others like it, that is clear gain. But if those ten are satisfied, he is content.
Alfred North Whitehead
#58. I think being a writer was a crappy job when you just had typewriters. It was crappy when we just had ink and paper. And it's sort of crappy now. It's always just you and the page. That doesn't change.
Colson Whitehead
#60. 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
#61. Maybe everything the slave catcher said was true, Cora thought, every justification, and the sons of Ham were cursed and the slave master performed the Lord's will. And maybe he was just a man talking to an outhouse door, waiting for someone to wipe her ass. -
Colson Whitehead
#62. You should have gone yourself, you ask for a Coke and they come back with orange drink. No one understands the martyrdom of the volunteers for the trip to food concession.
Colson Whitehead
#63. Mathematics as a science, commenced when first someone, probably a Greek, proved propositions about "any" things or about "some" things, without specifications of definite particular things.
Alfred North Whitehead
#64. It is failure that guides evolution; perfection provides no incentive for improvement, and nothing is perfect.
Colson Whitehead
#66. Ethnicity and morality can of course combine, giving the sense that "we" are "good" and "they" are "bad.
Hal Whitehead
#67. The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order. Life refuses to be embalmed alive. The more prolonged the halt in some unrelieved system of order, the greater the crash of the dead society.
Alfred North Whitehead
#68. The real history does not get written, because it is not in people's brains but in their nerves and vitals.
Alfred North Whitehead
#69. [In many circumstances,] the most important thing about a proposition is not that it be true, but that it be interesting.
Alfred North Whitehead
#70. It had been a humdrum couple of days, reaffirming his belief in reincarnation: everything was so boring that this could not be the first time he'd experienced it.
Colson Whitehead
#72. It was the softest bed she had ever lain in. But then, it was the only bed she had ever lain in.
Colson Whitehead
#73. 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
#74. Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness. Thus religion is solitariness; and if you are never solitary, you are never religious.
Alfred North Whitehead
#75. What the learned world tends to offer is one second-hand scrap of information illustrating ideas derived from another second-hand scrap of information. The second-handedness of the learned world is the secret of its mediocrity.
Alfred North Whitehead
#76. In a living civilization there is always an element of unrest, for sensitiveness to ideas means curiosity, adventure, change. Civilized order survives on its merits and is transformed by its power of recognizing its imperfections.
Alfred North Whitehead
#77. Mark Spitz didn't ask about Harry. You never asked about the characters that disappeared from a Last Night story. You knew the answer. The plague had a knack for narrative closure.
Colson Whitehead
#80. of a runaway? Freedom was a thing that shifted as you looked at it, the way a forest is dense with trees up close but from outside, from the
Colson Whitehead
#81. Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning.
Alfred North Whitehead
#82. The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature throughout the centuries is the notion of 'independent existence.' There is no such mode of existence; every entity is to be understood in terms of the way it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.
Alfred North Whitehead
#83. 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.
Alfred North Whitehead
#84. I have always noticed that deeply and truly religious persons are fond of a joke, and I am suspicious of those who aren't.
Alfred North Whitehead
#87. Since the night she was kidnapped she had been appraised and reappraised, each day waking upon the pan of a new scale. Know your value and you know your place in the order. To escape the boundary of the plantation was to escape the fundamental principles of your existence: impossible. It
Colson Whitehead
#89. One day a pickaninny was happy and the next the light was gone from them; in between they had been introduced to a new reality of bondage.
Colson Whitehead
#91. 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
#92. The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation.
Alfred North Whitehead
#93. Here's a tip for new parents: Start lowering those expectations early, it's going to pay off later.
Colson Whitehead
#95. The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment ... We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this great science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it.
Alfred North Whitehead
#96. "One and one make two" assumes that the changes in the shift of circumstance are unimportant. But it is impossible for us to analyze this notion of unimportant change.
Alfred North Whitehead
#97. The only way to know how long you are lost in the darkness is to be saved from it.
Colson Whitehead
#98. I always feel that I have two duties to perform with a parting guest: one, to see that he doesn't forget anything that is his; the other, to see that he doesn't take anything that is mine.
Alfred North Whitehead
#99. A general definition of civilization: a civilized society is exhibiting the fine qualities of truth, beauty, adventure, art, peace.
Alfred North Whitehead
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