Abstract Quote by Alfred North Whitehead

The new tinge to modern minds is a vehement and passionate interest in the relation of general principles to irreducible and stubborn facts. All…

— Alfred North Whitehead

Generalization is necessary to the advancement of knowledge; but particularity is indispensable to the creations of the imagination.

— Thomas B. Macaulay

“Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of idealizations and selections which we call our character. We extend this into…

— Walter Lippmann

The passionate controversies of one era are viewed as sterile preoccupations by another, for knowledge alters what we seek as well as what we…

— Freda Adler

This idea that there is generality in the specific is of far-reaching importance.

— Anonymous

Novelty is seldom the essential... make a subject better from its intrinsic nature.

— Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

It is this conception of the unity of the human career which is perhaps the greatest achievement of historical study, since it gained a…

— James Henry Breasted

If the universal is the essential, then it is the basis of all life and art. Recognizing and uniting with universal therefore gives us…

— Piet Mondrian

It is my inner conviction that the development of science seeks in the main to satisfy the longing for pure knowledge.

— Albert Einstein

Human nature is fond of novelty.

— Pliny the Elder

General ideas are essences. They are our gods: they round and ennoble the most partial and sordid way of living.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The vital power of an imaginative work demands a diversity within its unity; and the stronger the diversity the more massive the unity.”

— Anonymous