"No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it."

Alfred North Whitehead, English Mathematician

History, Time, Act, Idealism

2

Create Your Own Wallpaper

Standard

Customized

"No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it."

Explore more quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

"An enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words."

Experience

"No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it."

History

"Wisdom alone is true ambition's aim, wisdom is the source of virtue and of fame; obtained with labour, for mankind employed, and then, when most you share it, best enjoyed."

Wisdom

"It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression."

Expression

"Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains."

Thought

"Familiar things happen, and mankind does not bother about them. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious."

Mankind

"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them."

Civilization

"The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato."

Tradition

"Ideas won't keep; something must be done about them."

Ideas

"I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning, or destroyed it altogether."

Meaning

Exlpore more History quotes

"Ever since history has been written, ever since philosophy has meditated, misery has been the garment of the human race."

Victor Hugo, French Author

History, Philosophy, Misery, Humanity

"The commonplace books of the old Puritans were invaluable to them. They would never have been able to compile such works as they did if they had not been careful in collecting and arranging their matter under different heads."

Charles Spurgeon, British Clergyman

History, Books, Knowledge, Order, Learning

"The only lesson you can learn from history is that it repeats itself."

Bangambiki Habyarimana, Rwandan Author

History, Repetition, Lesson, Past

"Before printing was discovered, a century was equal to a thousand years."

Henry David Thoreau, American Author

History, Printing, Years

"Mankind have a little corrupted nature, for they were not born wolves, and they have become wolves; God has given them neither cannon of four-and-twenty pounders, nor bayonets; and yet they have made cannon and bayonets to destroy one another."

Voltaire, French Writer

History, Corruption, Nature, Violence, Humanity

"Hasn't there always been a moon?""Bless you. Not in the slightest. I remember the day the moon came. We looked up in the sky--it was all dirty brown and sooty gray here then, not green and blue..."

Neil Gaiman, British Author

History, Moon, Change, Truth

"What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past."

Victor Hugo, French Author

History, Echo, Future, Past

"Aristotle may be regarded as the cultural barometer of Western history. Whenever his influence dominated the scene, it paved the way for one of history's brilliant eras; whenever it fell, so did mankind."

Ayn Rand, Russian Writer

History, Culture, Philosophy, Decline

"Well, for us, in history where goodness is a rare pearl, he who was good almost takes precedence over he who was great."

Victor Hugo, French Author

History, Goodness

"Robbing people of their actual history is the same as robbing them of part of themselves. It's a crime."Fuka-Eri thought about that for a moment.Tengo went on, "Our memory is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us - is rewritten - we lose the ability to sustain our true selves."

Haruki Murakami, Japanese Writer

History, Memory, Identity, Crime