Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

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.

The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature throughout the centuries is the notion of 'independent existence.' There is no such mode of existence; every entity is to be understood in terms of the way it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.

No one who achieves success does so without acknowledging the help of others. The wise and confident acknowledge this help with gratitude.

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.

If a dog jumps into your lap, it is because he is fond of you; but if a cat does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer.

There are no whole truths: All truths are half-truths.

Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.

Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.

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

...the self-satisfied dogmatism with which mankind at each period of its history cherishes the delusion of the finality of existing modes of knowledge.

Knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows.

Symbolism is no mere idle fancy or corrupt degeneration: it is inherent in the very texture of human life.

From the very beginning of his education, the child should experience the joy of discovery.

The tragedy of the world is that those who are imaginative have but slight experience, and those who are experienced have feeble imaginations.

The point about zero is that we do not need to use it in the operation of daily life. No one goes out to buy zero fish.

We think in generalities, but we live in detail.

Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language.

God is in the world, or nowhere, creating continually in us and around us. Insofar as man partakes of this creative process does he partake of the divine, of God, and that participation is his immortality.

Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them.

In a sense, knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows, for details are swallowed up in principles. The details for knowledge which are important, will be picked up ad hoc in each avocation of life, but the habit of the active utilization of well-understood principles is the final possession of WISDOM.

How the past perishes is how the future becomes.

I put forward as a general definition of civilization, that a civilized society is exhibiting the five qualities of Truth, Beauty, Adventure, Art, Peace.

It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of life is to grasp as much as we can out of that infinitude.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

The chief error in philosophy is overstatement.

Ninety percent of our lives is governed by emotion. Our brains merely register and act upon what is telegraphed to them by our bodily experience. Intellect is to emotion as our clothes are to our bodies; we could not very well have civilized life without clothes, but we would be in a poor way if we had only clothes without bodies.

When you're average, you're just as close to the bottom as you are the top.

It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious.

Inventive genius requires pleasurable mental activity as a condition for its vigorous exercise

The pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit.

The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.

The foundation of reverence is this perception, that the present holds within itself the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, that whole amplitude of time, which is eternity.

Everyone is a philosopher. Not everyone is good at it.

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.

Inventive genius requires pleasurable mental activity as a condition for its vigorous exercise. "Necessity is the mother of invention" is a silly proverb. "Necessity is the mother of futile dodges" is much closer to the truth. The basis of growth of modern invention is science, and science is almost wholly the outgrowth of pleasurable intellectual curiosity.

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

Algebra is the intellectual instrument which has been created for rendering clear the quantitative aspects of the world.

The motive of success is not enough.

True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes, but the firm resolve of virtue and reason.

It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory.

The antithesis between a technical and a liberal education is fallacious. There can be no adequate technical education which is not liberal, and no liberal education which is not technical.

Thus the negative perception is the triumph of consciousness.

The absolute pacifist is a bad citizen; times come when force must be used to uphold right, justice and ideals.

Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science.

The essence of Christianity is the appeal to the life of Christ as a revelation of the nature of God and of God's agency in the world. The record is fragmentary, inconsistent, and uncertain. . . . But there can be no doubt as to what elements in the record have evoked a response from all that is best in human nature. The Mother, the Child, and the bare manger: the lowly man, homeless and self-forgetful, with his message of peace, love, and sympathy: the suffering, the agony, the tender words as life ebbed, the final despair: and the whole with the authority of supreme victory.

I would be a billionaire if I was looking to be a selfish boss. That's not me.