A Quote by Alfred North Whitehead

Without adventure all civilization is full of decay. Adventure rarely reaches its predetermined end. Columbus never reached China.

Alfred North Whitehead

Quote Topics

Adventure China Civilization Columbus Decay End Full Never Predetermined Rarely Reached Without

Quote Author

Alfred North Whitehead
English - Mathematician
February 15, 1861 - December 30, 1947

It is the striving after perfection that makes one an artist. It is the sense that one is imperfect, unfulfilled, unfinished. One attempts by a superhuman effort to fill the gap, to leap over it, to finish it in another medium. And one creates a third and separate thing: 'Adventure rarely reaches its predetermined end. Columbus never reached China. But he discovered America.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Without adventure civilization is in full decay.

Alfred North Whitehead

A race preserves its vigor so long as it harbors a real contrast between what has been and what may be; and so long as it is nerved by the vigor to adventure beyond the safeties of the past. Without adventure civilization is in full decay.

Alfred North Whitehead

Without adventure civilization is in full decay. ... The great fact [is] that in their day the great achievements of the past were the adventures of the past.

Alfred North Whitehead

New York is full of people . . . with a feeling for the tangential adventure, the risky adventure, the interlude that's not likely to end in any double-ring ceremony.

Joan Didion

An adventure is never an adventure when it happens. An adventure is simply physical and emotional discomfort recollected in tranquility.

Tim Cahill

An adventure is never an adventure while it's happening. Challenging experiences need time to ferment, and adventure is simply physical and emotional discomfort recollected in tranquillity.

Tim Cahill

Human life implies adventure, and there is no adventure without struggles and dangers.

Rene Dubos

Much early alchemy seems to have been adventure. You heated and mixed and burnt and pounded and to see what would happen. An adventure might suggest an hypothesis that can subsequently be tested, but adventure is prior to theory.

Ian Hacking

Whenever I finish a book, I go off and have some kind of adventure. Having had an adventure in my writing chair or on my writing sofa, an internal adventure, then I need to balance that off with an external adventure, so I'll go tramping through Africa or whitewater rafting or float to Hawaii in a martini shaker or something.

Tom Robbins

Life is full of surprises: new opportunities come up; that's part of the fun - the adventure of life. The thing is, chaos doesn't allow us to enjoy the adventure.

Patrick Lencioni

Give me an adventure. I'm not talking about some massive adventure. Just something that would make getting fired seem small. Something that I might remember when I'm old." "I can't predict the future," I said, "but based on what little I know so far, I'm afraid it has to be a massive adventure or nothing." "Great!" "Probably the kind of adventure that ends in a mass burial.

Neal Stephenson

Are wars... anything but the means whereby a nation's problems are set, where creation is stimulated - there you have adventure. But there is no adventure in heads-or-tails, in betting that the toss will come out of life or death. War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Life can become once more a grand adventure if we will surrender it to god. He brings one adventure to an end, only to open another to us. With him we must be ready for anything.

Paul Tournier

I have but one life to give to adventure. " Alexander Eliot -" Life is a fatal adventure. It can only have one end. So why not make it as far-ranging and free as possible.