A Quote by Alfred North Whitehead

The chief error in philosophy is overstatement.

Alfred North Whitehead

Quote Topics

Chief Error Overstatement Philosophy

Quote Author

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

Philosophy ought to question the basic assumptions of the age. Thinking through, critically and carefully, what most of us take for granted is, I believe, the chief task of philosophy, and the task that makes philosophy a worthwhile activity.

Peter Singer

Let the answers be wrong, let the philosophy be mistaken - errors are more valuable than truths: truth is of the machine, error is alive; truth reassures, error disturbs.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

Error is a supposition that pleasure and pain, that intelligence, substance, life, are existent in matter. Error is neither Mind nor one of Mind's faculties. Error is the contradiction of Truth. Error is a belief without understanding. Error is unreal because untrue. It is that which stemma to be and is not. If error were true, its truth would be error, and we should have a self-evident absurdity -namely, erroneous truth. Thus we should continue to lose the standard of Truth.

Mary Baker Eddy

Error is not just acceptable, it is necessary for the continuation of life, provided it is not too great. A large error is a catastrophe, a small error is essential for enhancing existence. Without error, there is no movement. Death follows.

Jacques Lecoq

When we do not know the truth of a thing, it is good that there should exist a common error which determines the mind of man, as, for example, the moon, to which is attributed the change of seasons, the progress of diseases, etc. For the chief malady of man is a restless curiosity about things which he cannot understand; and it is not so bad for him to be in error as to be curious to no purpose.

Blaise Pascal

The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error.

Hannah Arendt

No consensus of men can make an error erroneous. We can only find or commit an error, not create it. When we commit an error, we say what was an error already.

Josiah Royce

The chief business of seventeenth-century philosophy was to reckon with seventeenth-century science... the chief business of twentieth-century philosophy is to reckon with twentieth-century history.

Robin G. Collingwood

The chief danger to philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence.

Alfred North Whitehead

Our conviction that the world is meaningless is due in part to the fact (discussed in a later paragraph) that the philosophy of meaningless lends itself very effectively to furthering the ends of political and erotic passion; in part to a genuine intellectual error - the error of identifying the world of science, a world from which all meaning has deliberately been excluded, with ultimate reality.

Aldous Huxley

My chief 'success philosophy' is, 'Give people every opportunity to say "Yes" to you'.

Robert Holden

There has been grave error. I do not mean so much error of doctrine as error of emphasis.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

Prejudice for regularity and simplicity is a source of error that has only too often infected philosophy.

Roger Joseph Boscovich

Do not commence your exercises in philosophy in those regions where an error can deliver you over to the executioner.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth - that error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it has been cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.