Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

Inventive genius requires pleasurable mental activity as a condition for its vigorous exercise

The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.

Intellectual curiosity drove Einstein to some of the world's most important discoveries.

Sentences or solutions occur to me in the shower, or while running on the treadmill, or riding on the subway.

I pressed down the mental accelerator. The old lemon throbbed fiercely. I got an idea.

Once children learn how to learn, nothing is going to narrow their mind. The essence of teaching is to make learning contagious, to have one idea spark another.

The scientist needs an artistically creative imagination.

Original thinking migrates each day in search of nourishment.

No man ever made a great discovery without the exercise of the imagination.

Big ideas come from the unconscious. This is true in art, in science, and in advertising. But your unconscious has to be well informed, or your idea will be irrelevant. Stuff your conscious mind with information, then unhook your rational thought process. You can help this process by going for a long walk, or taking a hot bath, or drinking half a pint of claret. Suddenly, if the telephone line from your unconscious is open, a big idea wells up within you.

Men of genius sometimes accomplish most when they work least, for they are thinking out inventions.

Think, the successful idea is always in your mind. Think it out.

anything that stretches the mind is a help to the potential author.

Live the full life of the mind, exhilarated by new ideas, intoxicated by the Romance of the unusual.

Knowing a lot...is a springboard to creativity.

All that was required to measure the planet was a man with a stick and a brain. In other words, couple an intellect with some experimental apparatus and almost anything seems achievable.

[Mathematics] unceasingly calls forth the faculties of observation and comparison; one of its principal weapons is induction: it has frequent recourse to trial and verification; and it affords a boundless scope for the exercise of the highest efforts of imagination and invention.

A popular author is one who writes what the people think. Genius invites them to think something else.

Imagination! My problem is that I have so many ideas, I never have enough time to use them all. Just the other day I thought up eleven things I could do with a flowerpot. Eleven! Three of those things didn't even involve plants.

People frequently believe the creative life is grounded in fantasy. The more difficult truth is that creativity is grounded in reality, in the particular, the focused, the well observed or specifically imagined.

It can be said with complete confidence that any scientist of any age who wants to make important discoveries must study important problems. Dull or piffling problems yield dull or piffling answers. It is not enough that a problem should be "interesting".

In the light, we read the inventions of others; in the darkness we invent our own stories.

I don't believe in the sort of "Eureka!" moment idea. I think it's a myth. I'm very suspicious that actually Archimedes had been thinking about that problem for a long time.

They enjoy thinking. They enjoy being creative. They enjoy having ideas. Most people do not enjoy thinking at all.

I'm always busy. You know, the more I do, the more ideas I have—that's the funny thing. The brain is a muscle, and I'm a kind of body builder.