Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

At a certain point, what people mean when they use a word becomes its meaning.

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.'

We cannot isolate a human being from the circumstances of his condition

Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances.

You're only as good as your options and your surroundings.

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances.

Democritus said, words are but the shadows of actions.

Sovereign," like "love," means anything you want it to mean; it's a word in dictionary between "sober" and "sozzled.

Circumstances make man, not man circumstances.

Your circumstances don't dictate your future. ... Your circumstances don't limit you.

True education must correspond to the surrounding circumstances or it is not a healthy growth.

All I say is by way of discourse, and nothing by way of advice. I should not speak so boldly if it were my due to be believed.

The problem posed by indirect speech acts is the problem of how it is possible for the speaker to say one thing and mean that but also to mean something else.

In the performance of an illocutionary act in the literal utterance of a sentence, the speaker intends to produce a certain effect by means of getting the hearer to recognize his intention to produce that effect; and furthermore, if he is using the words literally, he intends this recognition to be achieved in virtue of the fact that the rules for using the expressions he utters associate the expression with the production of that effect.

What it targets is not something that's really looked at a lot in terms of the war. This is stuff that's off the beaten path in terms of what we think of every time you start a Civil War history or a Civil War presentation. It's usually about the military and the soldiers and all that stuff. And this is not. It's the backdrop to a place and a time and circumstances that didn't have anything to do with that.

Do remember that one line does nothing; it is only in relation to another that it creates a volume.

I'm always following the characters and I'm always interested in what happens to them, but what happens to them is conditioned by the circumstances in which they live.

How we live our lives does not,unfortunately depend on us alone.Circumstances,good or bad,constantly intervene.A person close to us die.A person not so close to us carries on living.All these things affect how we live.

I want to make clear only that words are not the things spoken about, and that there is no such thing as an object in absolute isolation.

I guess under the right circumstances, a man will do just about anything.

Speech is not a means in the service of an external end. It contains its own rule of usage, ethics, and view of the world, as a gesture sometimes bears the whole truth about a man.

It's the circumstances of popular monarchy, the manner in which it's developed, and it is also the fault of the people who present her with this unquestioning adulation. In other words, it's their lack of a larger faith. Which makes them fasten onto, a purely earthly symbol.

Age, like woman, requires fit surroundings.

The closed language does not demonstrate and explain it communicates decision, dictum, command. Where it defines, the definition becomes "separation of good from evil;" it establishes unquestionable

It's only now that I realize that behaviour always has a context and precedents, it's what you do rather than what you are, although we often never recognise that context or understand what these precedents are.