Top 100 Whitehead's Quotes
#1. So Whitehead's metaphysics doesn't fit very well on to physics as we understand the process of the world.
John Polkinghorne
#2. No, Fulton was colored. She understands this luminous truth. Natchez did not lie about that: she has seen it in the man's books, made plain by her new literacy. In the last few days she has learned how to read, like a slave does, one forbidden word at a time.
Colson Whitehead
#3. That's how the European tribes operate, she said. If they can't control it, they destroy it.
Colson Whitehead
#4. The doctor was a frequent visitor at Miss Trumball's establishment, preferring it to the Lanchester house, whose girls had a saturnine disposition in his opinion, as if imported from Maine or other gloom-loving provinces.
Colson Whitehead
#5. But it's like riding a bike. A hell-bike, made out of hell.
Colson Whitehead
#6. It's not all been rosy; I've had difficult situations where I've failed. But when you fail you learn a lot about yourself and come back stronger. The message is: life need not have limits. Having an opportunity in life is important but what defines you is what you do with that opportunity.
Richard Whitehead
#7. The theme of Cosmology, which is the basis of all religions, is the story of the dynamic effort of the World passing into everlasting unity, and of the static majesty of God's vision, accomplishing its purpose of completion by absorption of the World's multiplicity of effort.
Alfred North Whitehead
#8. 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
#9. Yet when his classmates put their blades to a colored cadaver, they did more for the cause of colored advancement than the most high-minded abolitionist. In death the negro became a human being. Only then was he the white man's equal.
Colson Whitehead
#10. It's like peanut butter and chocolate. Each is great, but they're better together.
Richard Whitehead
#11. Sometimes such an experience bound one person to another; just as often the shame of one's powerlessness made all witnesses into enemies.
Colson Whitehead
#12. He spills his guts, it was the last sip that sent him over the edge but she has her hands full with her own loneliness, she's not about to take on his. Reach inside to muzzle the broken part of you that is now talking.
Colson Whitehead
#13. A lot of my writer friends live near me, and that makes people think we just hang around with one another in cafes, trading work and discussing 'Harper's' and what not. But I rarely see them. We're home working.
Colson Whitehead
#14. 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
#15. Everyone was fucked up in their own way; as before, it was a mark of one's individuality.
Colson Whitehead
#16. 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
#17. I'm not perfect. I've made mistakes. I'd do a lot of things different if I could. I'd never, ever, get involved with surrogacy again. It's so weird.
Mary Beth Whitehead
#18. In death the negro became a human being. Only then was he the white man's equal. On
Colson Whitehead
#19. 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
#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
#26. 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
#27. Sarsaparilla boiled for one of Sybil's tonics, overpowering the aroma of the roasting meat. Cora
Colson Whitehead
#28. don't go blaming yourself for your son's mistakes. You can't blame yourself for their mistakes any more than you can take credit for the right ones they make.
J.L. Whitehead
#29. Nowdays, Rosie the Rivetere was a former soccer mom who had just opened her own catering business when Last Night came down and her husband and kids were eaten by a parking attendant at the local megamall's discount- appliance emporium.
Colson Whitehead
#30. Settlers needed the land, and if the Indians hadn't learned by then that the white man's treaties were entirely worthless, Ridgeway said, they deserved what they got.
Colson Whitehead
#31. Poetry and prayer put ideas in people's heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world.
Colson Whitehead
#32. 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
#33. The merit of Locke's 'Essay Concerning Human Understanding' is its adequacy, and not its consistency ... He should have widened the title of his book into 'An Essay Concerning Experience.
Alfred North Whitehead
#34. Craftsmen and artisans created items that were brittle rumors compared with his father's iron facts.
Colson Whitehead
#35. A plantation was a plantation; one might think one's misfortunes distinct, but the true horror lay in their universality.
Colson Whitehead
#36. Well, imagine you are alone in a room....Are you the best, most special person in the room right now? Yes. That's the gift of being alone.
Colson Whitehead
#38. Without deductive logic science would be entirely useless. It is merely a barren game to ascend from the particular to the general, unless afterwards we can reverse the process and descend from the general to the particular, ascending and descending like angels on Jacob's ladder.
Alfred North Whitehead
#39. What does the perfect elevator look like, the one that will deliver us from the cities we suffer now, these stunted shacks? We don't know because we can't see inside it, it's something we cannot imagine, like the shape of angels' teeth. It's a black box.
Colson Whitehead
#40. 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
#41. I like movies. I've written screenplays as a sort of procrastination thing for me. Like I'll work for a couple months on this idea that's been kicking around and then like 30 pages in I'll just go try a novel because it's a lot easier. That's what I know. So why am I killing myself?
Colson Whitehead
#42. People wanted me to be like the Madonna, the white nun, you know, and that's not me. But I'm no villain.
Mary Beth Whitehead
#43. The negro's story may have started in this country with degradation, but triumph and prosperity would be his one day.
Colson Whitehead
#44. the children make of it what they can. What they don't understand today, they might tomorrow. "The Declaration is like a map. You trust that it's right, but you only know by going out and testing it yourself.
Colson Whitehead
#45. Wisdom alone is true ambition's aim, wisdom is the source of virtue and of fame; obtained with labour, for mankind employed, and then, when most you share it, best enjoyed.
Alfred North Whitehead
#46. To preempt rejection she dresses to exaggerate her difference when the true enemy is not the world's disdain but its indifference. He is surely the next item in a dreary procession and cannot be seen for all those previous disappointments.
Colson Whitehead
#47. 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
#48. Tonight the song you always despised strides from the jukebox full-bodied and you hear the lyrics for the first time, understand the lyrics for the first time after all these years. This new you with an older soul. Now it's your favorite. All this time singing the wrong words.
Colson Whitehead
#49. Don't go searching for a subject, let your subject find you. You can't rush inspiration. ... Once your subject finds you, it's like falling in love. It will be your constant companion. Shadowing you, peeping in your windows, calling you at all hours to leave messages like, Only you understand me.
Colson Whitehead
#51. I don't particularly like being pregnant. I like the baby at the end. Pregnancy is a very distant thing for me. I can't seem to believe there's really a baby there. It's such a miracle.
Mary Beth 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. 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
#65. 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
#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. 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
#79. 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
#80. Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning.
Alfred North Whitehead
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#86. 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
#88. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. Here's a tip for new parents: Start lowering those expectations early, it's going to pay off later.
Colson Whitehead
#94. 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
#95. "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
#96. The only way to know how long you are lost in the darkness is to be saved from it.
Colson Whitehead
#97. 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
#98. A general definition of civilization: a civilized society is exhibiting the fine qualities of truth, beauty, adventure, art, peace.
Alfred North Whitehead
#100. It is failure that guides evolution; perfection provides no incentive for improvement, and nothing is perfect.
Colson Whitehead
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