All practical teachers know that education is a patient process of mastery of details, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day.
Alfred North WhiteheadRead
Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote suggests that many great ideas were not original but rather echoed by others throughout history.
Alfred North Whitehead's quote highlights the notion that significant thoughts and insights are often rediscoveries of ideas that have been articulated before. It implies that human understanding and expression are built upon the foundations laid by others, and that innovation often comes from remixing or reiterating established concepts rather than creating entirely new ones from scratch.
Themes
IdeasHistoryInsightDiscoveryOriginality
In practice
Example use cases
In a lecture on creativity, you might say this quote to emphasize the importance of acknowledging past thinkers.
More from Alfred North Whitehead
All quotes βThe vitality of thought is in adventure. Idea's won't keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervour, live for it, and, if need be, die for it. Their inheritors receive the idea, perhaps now strong and successful, but without inheriting the fervour; so the idea settles down to a comfortable middle age, turns senile, and dies.
Alfred North WhiteheadRead
The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, seek simplicity and distrust it.
Alfred North WhiteheadRead
As society is now constituted, a literal adherence to the moral precepts scattered throughout the Gospels would mean sudden death.
Alfred North WhiteheadRead
I consider Christianity to be one of the great disasters of the human race... It would be impossible to imagine anything more un - Christianlike than theology.
Alfred North WhiteheadRead
Inventive genius requires pleasurable mental activity as a condition for its vigorous exercise. "Necessity is the mother of invention" is a silly proverb. "Necessity is the mother of futile dodges" is much closer to the truth. The basis of growth of modern invention is science, and science is almost wholly the outgrowth of pleasurable intellectual curiosity.
Alfred North WhiteheadRead
Similar quotes
To be a human being means to possess a feeling of inferiority which constantly presses towards its own conquest. The greater the feeling of inferiority that has been experienced, the more powerful is the urge for conquest and the more violent the emotional agitation.
Alfred AdlerRead
Every man on earth is sick with the fever of sin, with the blindness of sin and is overcome with its fury. As sins consist mostly of malice and pride, it is necessary to treat everyone who suffers from the malady of sin with kindness and love. This is an important truth, which we often forget. Very often we act in the opposite manner: we add malice to malice by our anger, we oppose pride with pride. Thus, evil grows within us and does not decrease; it is not cured - rather it spreads
John Of KronstadtRead
While the impostor draws his identity from past achievements and the adulation of others, the true self claims identity in its belovedness. We encounter God in the ordinariness of life: not in the search for spiritual highs and extraordinary, mystical experiences but in our simple presence in life.
Brennan ManningRead
No matter who or what we are, God restores us to right standing with Himself only by means of the death of Jesus Christ.
Oswald ChambersRead
It rubs the lotion on its skin. It does this whenever it is told.
Thomas HarrisRead
Over the years, I realized there was a Republican philosophy that I liked. And then they lost it. And LIBERTARIANS had more of it. Because what I really believe is, let's spend a little more time leaving everybody alone.
Clint EastwoodRead