A Quote by Alfred North Whitehead

We think in generalities, but we live in detail. To make the past live, we must perceive it in detail in addition to thinking of it in generalities.

Alfred North Whitehead

Quote Topics

Addition Detail Generalities Live Make Must Past Perceive Think Thinking

Quote Author

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

We think in generalities, but we live in detail.

Alfred North Whitehead

Intellectual generalities are always interesting, but generalities in morals mean absolutely nothing.

Oscar Wilde

What profound reward you must glean from studying the world so closely....Too many people turn away from small wonders, I find. There is so much more potency to be found in detail than generalities, but most souls cannot train themselves to sit still for it.

Elizabeth Gilbert

The devil's in the detail and sometimes if you're thinking too big, you can miss the detail.

Bill Bailey

There's nothing particularly wrong with being more pessimistic than optimistic. Optimism is broad-based, non-detail-oriented thinking; pessimism is detail-oriented thinking.

David Rakoff

History is one of those marvelous and necessary illusions we have to deal with. It's one of the ways of dealing with our world with impossible generalities which we couldn't live without.

Howard Nemerov

Campaigns are fun. Campaigns are police escorts, they're airplanes, they're crowds, they're balloons, they're bands, a lot of fun. You speak in vague generalities. You get applause for slogans. And then governing comes. And governing is tedious and it's difficult an it's time-consuming and it demands your attention. And policy isn't vague generalities. It's specifics and it's based on knowledge.

Mark Shields

Politicians... talk in generalities and lies, and I think they've caused all our grief. They're so awful, they're really funny. I hate thinking this because my dad loved politics.

Paul Lynde

The detail of my art depends entirely on the project itself. I tend to be a little more detail-oriented with covers than I am with interior pages, and I try to reduce the detail on action sequences as opposed to suspense passages.

Brian Stelfreeze

The human mind feels restless and dissatisfied under the anxieties of ignorance. It longs for the repose of conviction; and to gain this repose it will often rather precipitate its conclusions than wait for the tardy lights of observation and experiment. There is such a thing, too, as the love of simplicity and system,--a prejudice of the understanding which disposes it to include all the phenomena of nature under a few sweeping generalities,--an indolence which loves to repose on the beauties of a theory rather than encounter the fatiguing detail of its evidences.

Thomas Chalmers

The dot stands for 'detail' - always be paying attention to detail. I feel that people take you as serious as you take yourself. I spent a lot of time working on my craft, developing my style, and after I came out of my little incubation, I promised that I would pay attention to detail.

Anderson Paak

I think that political coverage generally comes in on a level that means if you live and breathe Westminster detail and diary, then you get it.

Kate Garraway

In the natural sciences, and particularly in chemistry, generalities must come after the detailed knowledge of each fact and not before it.

Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac

Often in football a game is really balanced and one small detail will make the difference between winning and losing. We try to find the detail that makes the difference for us.

Marco Silva

The airline business is fast-paced, high risk, and highly leveraged. It puts a premium on things I like to do. I think I communicate well. And I am very good at detail. I love detail.