Skip to content
quotesby

About this quote

What does it mean?
Intellect relates to emotion as clothes do to bodies; civilization needs intellect but cannot survive without the underlying emotional core. Relying only on intellect leaves you empty.
In plain terms
Intellect is useful like clothes, but you need emotions like a body to survive.
What can you take from it?
Balance intellect with emotion to live fully.

Where it applies

  • personal development
  • leadership
  • social interaction

Putting it to work

  • value emotional intelligence
  • study philosophy alongside art

Questions to consider

  • Which do you rely on more?
  • How do you balance them?

Another view

It assumes a strict dichotomy between intellect and emotion.

More from Alfred North Whitehead

  1. 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 pow…

    Permalink to quote #60
  2. 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 as…

    Permalink to quote #62
  3. A philosopher of imposing stature doesn't think in a vacuum. Even his most abstract ideas are, to some extent, conditioned by what is or is not known in the ti…

    Permalink to quote #59

Related quotes

  1. A reasoning, self-sufficing thing, An intellectual All-in-all!

    William WordsworthWilliam Wordsworth quote #105
  2. Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular.

    Jonathan FranzenJonathan Franzen quote #1
  3. The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.

    William Butler YeatsWilliam Butler Yeats quote #1