Top 100 Whitehead Quotes

#1. The first time I heard Ron Whitehead read I felt what I imagine those who heard Abraham Lincoln deliver The Gettysburg Address felt.

David Amram

Whitehead Quotes #455527
#2. I have long admired Ron Whitehead. He is crazy as nine loons, and his poetry is a dazzling mix of folk wisdom and pure mathematics

Hunter S. Thompson

Whitehead Quotes #518091
#3. So Whitehead's metaphysics doesn't fit very well on to physics as we understand the process of the world.

John Polkinghorne

Whitehead Quotes #683919
#4. Seek simplicity, but distrust it," Alfred North Whitehead, the mathematician and philosopher, once advised his students. Dobzhansky

Siddhartha Mukherjee

Whitehead Quotes #742505
#5. Racism is a stubborn whitehead on the face of society.

Stefan Emunds

Whitehead Quotes #756668
#6. People come out of prison and aren't treated like I've been treated. I didn't kill anybody. I didn't violate anybody's rights. My rights were violated. Nobody likes to be hated, but the whole world hated Mary Beth Whitehead.

Mary Beth Whitehead

Whitehead Quotes #886661
#7. Whitehead reacted strongly against the idea of God as a cosmic tyrant, one who brings about everything.

John Polkinghorne

Whitehead Quotes #1056140
#8. As Alfred North Whitehead once put it, those who devote themselves to the purpose of proving that there is no purpose constitute an interesting subject for study.

Edward Feser

Whitehead Quotes #1098295
#9. Well it was not exactly a dissertation in logic, at least not the kind of logic you would find in Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica for instance. It looked more like mathematics; no formalized language was used.

Alonzo Church

Whitehead Quotes #1105559
#10. The true task of education, Alfred North Whitehead cautioned, is to abjure stale knowledge. "Knowledge does not keep any better than fish," he said. We need to keep it alive, vital, potent.

Howard Zinn

Whitehead Quotes #1209313
#11. Out of the ashes of Sara Whitehead rose Melissa Stern. Out of the ashes of Mary Beth Whitehead, there were pieces lost.

Mary Beth Whitehead

Whitehead Quotes #1222646
#12. Poetry has ceased to be a public art and has become, as Whitehead said of religion, What man does with his aloneness.

Kenneth Rexroth

Whitehead Quotes #1289639
#13. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle - they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments. - ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD

Ray Kurzweil

Whitehead Quotes #1510634
#14. The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead has advised us to "seek simplicity and distrust it.

Scott Richard Shaw

Whitehead Quotes #1648509
#15. Robert Whitehead built the first self-propelled torpedo.

Jeff Edwards

Whitehead Quotes #1743967
#16. I have in later years taken to Euclid, Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, in an elemental way.

Carl Sandburg

Whitehead Quotes #1852353
#17. 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

Whitehead Quotes #4433
#18. 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

Whitehead Quotes #5064
#19. 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

Whitehead Quotes #12974
#20. 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

Whitehead Quotes #14060
#21. It was the softest bed she had ever lain in. But then, it was the only bed she had ever lain in.

Colson Whitehead

Whitehead Quotes #16615
#22. Nature's laws have to supersede man's law.

Mary Beth Whitehead

Whitehead Quotes #19490
#23. 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

Whitehead Quotes #21956
#24. [In many circumstances,] the most important thing about a proposition is not that it be true, but that it be interesting.

Alfred North Whitehead

Whitehead Quotes #28493
#25. The real history does not get written, because it is not in people's brains but in their nerves and vitals.

Alfred North Whitehead

Whitehead Quotes #38269
#26. 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

Whitehead Quotes #44179
#27. Ethnicity and morality can of course combine, giving the sense that "we" are "good" and "they" are "bad.

Hal Whitehead

Whitehead Quotes #50857
#28. Resentment was the hinge of her personality.

Colson Whitehead

Whitehead Quotes #70577
#29. 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

Whitehead Quotes #72268
#30. 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

Whitehead Quotes #72360
#31. 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

Whitehead Quotes #86286
#32. 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

Whitehead Quotes #88980
#33. 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

Whitehead Quotes #94067
#34. Seek simplicity but distrust it.

Alfred North Whitehead

Whitehead Quotes #96385
#35. 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

Whitehead Quotes #98886
#36. Speak out in acts; the time for words has passed, and only deeds will suffice.

Alfred North Whitehead

Whitehead Quotes #103938
#37. 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

Whitehead Quotes #111239
#38. 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

Whitehead Quotes #111573
#39. 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

Whitehead Quotes #119130
#40. The whole of mathematics consists in the organization of a series of aids to the imagination in the process of reasoning.

Alfred North Whitehead

Whitehead Quotes #129396
#41. 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

Whitehead Quotes #129405
#42. It is failure that guides evolution; perfection provides no incentive for improvement, and nothing is perfect.

Colson Whitehead

Whitehead Quotes #133131
#43. Nature, even in the act of satisfying anticipation, often provides a surprise.

Alfred North Whitehead

Whitehead Quotes #139948
#44. A general definition of civilization: a civilized society is exhibiting the fine qualities of truth, beauty, adventure, art, peace.

Alfred North Whitehead

Whitehead Quotes #141281
#45. 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

Whitehead Quotes #143003
#46. The only way to know how long you are lost in the darkness is to be saved from it.

Colson Whitehead

Whitehead Quotes #144250
#47. "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

Whitehead Quotes #150586
#48. 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

Whitehead Quotes #151457
#49. Every really new idea looks crazy at first.

Alfred North Whitehead

Whitehead Quotes #152490
#50. Here's a tip for new parents: Start lowering those expectations early, it's going to pay off later.

Colson Whitehead

Whitehead Quotes #152535
#51. 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

Whitehead Quotes #171931
#52. 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

Whitehead Quotes #172048
#53. Philosophy asks the simple question: What is it all about?

Alfred North Whitehead

Whitehead Quotes #173195
#54. 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

Whitehead Quotes #175842
#55. In the slow motion that is the speed of humiliation.

Colson Whitehead

Whitehead Quotes #176344
#56. 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

Whitehead Quotes #177007
#57. When success turns a man's head he faces failure

Alfred North Whitehead

Whitehead Quotes #177314
#58. You can't rush inspiration.

Colson Whitehead

Whitehead Quotes #190210
#59. 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

Whitehead Quotes #192819
#60. 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

Whitehead Quotes #193953
#61. 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

Whitehead Quotes #196177
#62. Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning.

Alfred North Whitehead

Whitehead Quotes #196518
#63. 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

Whitehead Quotes #197226
#64. Life is the enjoyment of emotion, derived from the past and aimed at the future.

Alfred North Whitehead

Whitehead Quotes #198548
#65. Religion is the reaction of human nature to its search for God.

Alfred North Whitehead

Whitehead Quotes #212385
#66. 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

Whitehead Quotes #213265
#67. 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

Whitehead Quotes #214718
#68. Religion increasingly is tending to degenerate into a decent formula wherewith to embellish a comfortable life.

Alfred North Whitehead

Whitehead Quotes #226649
#69. Great people plant trees they'll never sit under.

Alfred North Whitehead

Whitehead Quotes #229272
#70. Each human being is a more complex structure than any social system to which he belongs.

Alfred North Whitehead

Whitehead Quotes #230423
#71. 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

Whitehead Quotes #238233
#72. 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

Whitehead Quotes #242087
#73. From the very beginning of his education, the child should experience the joy of discovery.

Alfred North Whitehead

Whitehead Quotes #246281
#74. Two white men in two days had their hands around her. Was this a condition of her freedom? Caesar

Colson Whitehead

Whitehead Quotes #254180
#75. Dogmatism is the anti-Christ of learning.

Alfred North Whitehead

Whitehead Quotes #256760
#76. It belongs to the self-respect of intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final unravelment.

Alfred North Whitehead

Whitehead Quotes #260593
#77. Vigorous societies harbour a certain extravagance of objectives.

Alfred North Whitehead

Whitehead Quotes #262434
#78. 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

Whitehead Quotes #269024
#79. 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

Whitehead Quotes #270558
#80. I was inspired to become a writer by horror movies and science fiction.

Colson Whitehead

Whitehead Quotes #270766
#81. 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

Whitehead Quotes #271666
#82. Apart from blunt truth, our lives sink decadently amid the perfume of hints and suggestions.

Alfred North Whitehead

Whitehead Quotes #274976
#83. Stolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood.

Colson Whitehead

Whitehead Quotes #275731
#84. A monster is a person who has stopped pretending.

Colson Whitehead

Whitehead Quotes #277093
#85. 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

Whitehead Quotes #278744
#86. Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions.

Alfred North Whitehead

Whitehead Quotes #281243
#87. He considers me just a uterus with legs.

Mary Beth Whitehead

Whitehead Quotes #282207
#88. 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

Whitehead Quotes #283680
#89. No reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the ground of rationality.

Alfred North Whitehead

Whitehead Quotes #290188
#90. 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

Whitehead Quotes #291438
#91. Life! What Inscrutable Card Shall Ye Throw Next Upon the Soft Felt of Our Days?

Colson Whitehead

Whitehead Quotes #293777
#92. In death the negro became a human being. Only then was he the white man's equal. On

Colson Whitehead

Whitehead Quotes #302114
#93. The only simplicity to be trusted is the simplicity to be found on the far side of complexity.

Alfred North Whitehead

Whitehead Quotes #303371
#94. Philosophy is the product of wonder.

Alfred North Whitehead

Whitehead Quotes #310461
#95. 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

Whitehead Quotes #313701
#96. On the ostensible exactitude of certain branches of human knowledge, including mathematics. The exactness is a fake.

Alfred North Whitehead

Whitehead Quotes #314834
#97. 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

Whitehead Quotes #330373
#98. 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

Whitehead Quotes #335718
#99. The absolute pacifist is a bad citizen; times come when force must be used to uphold right, justice and ideals.

Alfred North Whitehead

Whitehead Quotes #339151
#100. We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them.

Colson Whitehead

Whitehead Quotes #344344

Famous Authors

Popular Topics

Scroll to Top