Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

Novels help us to resist the temptation to think of the past as deficient.

We are often wrong about the past, but at least with the past you can change your thinking. We can't do that with the future.

You think that just because it's already happened, the past is finished and unchangeable? Oh no, the past is cloaked in multicolored taffeta and every time we look at it we see a different hue.

It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past.

When we think about the present, we veer wildly between the belief in chance and the evidence in favour of determinism. When we think about the past, however, it seems obvious that everything happened in the way that it was intended.

To experience thinking outside the brain is to enter a world of instantaneous connections that make ordinary thinking (i.e those aspects limited by the physical brain and the speed of light_ seem like some hopelessly sleepy and plodding event. Our truest, deepest self is completely free. It is not crippled or compromised by past actions or concerned with identity or status. It comprehends that it has no need to fear the earthly world, and therefore, it has no need to build itself up through fame or wealth or conquest.

I wouldn't change my past for anything, because I think it's made me who I am. I'm so enormously grateful for all that I have in my life.

I think you'd best make your peace with the past since you've come this far. I think you know by now that you won't go back again.

Nineteen thousand children [are] dying every day. Does it really matter that we're not walking past them in the street? Does it really matter that they're far away? I don't think it does make a morally relevant difference.

All nations have present, or past, or future reasons for thinking themselves incomparable.

A parable: A man was examining the construction of a cathedral. He asked a stone mason what he was doing chipping the stones, and the mason replied, "I am making stones." He asked a stone carver what he was doing. "I am carving a gargoyle." And so it went, each person said in detail what they were doing. Finally he came to an old woman who was sweeping the ground. She said. "I am helping build a cathedral." ...Most of the time each person is immersed in the details of one special part of the whole and does not think of how what they are doing relates to the larger picture.

In the past, friendship was a huge thing. But it's hard for us to think of friendship as a calling, because it's not a vocation.

As I was walking up the stairs to dad's old room, and I was looking at the photographs, I started thinking that there was a time when these weren't memories. That someone actually took the photograph, and the people in the photograph had just eaten lunch or something.

And the kittykats would have to erect scaffolding and a pulley to get him down. Mind you, I wouldn't put that past them. Sometimes when they are behind the sofa supposedly purring, I think they are drilling.

I think that you can treat a classic like a museum piece -stuffed and mounted- or you can make it a living, breathing narrative that is unfolding right then and there.

I admire about Hillary: Every time I am going to walk away from her candidacy, I think, she has absorbed more hate than anyone I can think of over the past twenty years, and she hasn't cracked under it. That's a kind of iron fortitude that maybe we need in the President of the United States. People project on to Hillary because she is a woman. They either hate her for everything they hate about women or they long for her to be everything they want in a woman. It's an impossible burden.

Because you are obsessed with the idea of past, present, and future, you are forced to think of reincarnations as strung out one before the other. Indeed we speak of past lives because you are used to the time sequence concept... You have dominant egos, all part of an inner identity, dominant in various existences. But the separate existences exist simultaneously. Only the egos involved make the time distinction... a thousand years in your past or in your future - all exist now.

Don't think of what's past!" said she. "I am not going to think outside of now. Why should we! Who knows what tomorrow has in store?

One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.

I feel I have proved myself just as much as everybody else does. I usually don't think about the past too much. I just try to perform the routines I have been practicing.

Canada has had populist movements in the past, virtually since its inception. I don't think the central Canadian elites have ever understood populism at all, particularly the Western version of it.

There are times when I think that the reading I have done in the past has had no effect except to cloud my mind and make me indecisive

We were terribly excited, and I think we took it on our shoulders that we were creating the 21st century in 1971. That was the idea. And we wanted to just blast everything in the past, rather like the vorticists did at the beginning of the century in the Britain or the dadaists did Europe, you know. It was the same sensibility of everything is rubbish, and all rubbish is wonderful.

I got to wear blinders all the time so I won't think sideways or in the past.

I think, there is a possibility - I would say it's more than that - that we will come to a view of foreign policy going forward that learns from the past but doesn't get captured by it.