9 Alfred North Whitehead Quotes on Thinking

Alfred North Whitehead quotes on thinking

5. We do not require elaborate training merely in order to refrain from embarking upon intricate trains of inference. Such abstinence is only too easy.

8. It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. 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.

9. Philosophy, in one of its functions, is the critic of cosmologies. It is its function to harmonise, refashion, and justify divergent intuitions as to the nature of things. It has to insist on the scrutiny of the ultimate ideas, and on the retention of the whole of the evidence in shaping our cosmological scheme. Its business is to render explicit, and - so far as may be - efficient, a process which otherwise is unconsciously performed without rational tests.

27. Rationalism is an adventure in the clarification of thought.

51. There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.

59. 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 time when he lives.

71. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

73. We think in generalities, but we live in details.

75. Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.