There are two principles inherent in the very nature of things, recurring in some particular embodiments whatever field we explore - the spirit of change, and the spirit of conservation. There can be nothing real without both. Mere change without conservation is a passage from nothing to nothing. . . . Mere conservation without change cannot conserve. For after all, there is a flux of circumstance, and the freshness of being evaporates under mere repetition.
Alfred North WhiteheadReligion is what the individual does with his own solitariness. Thus religion is solitariness; and if you are never solitary, you are never religious.
Alfred North WhiteheadThe real history does not get written, because it is not in people's brains but in their nerves and vitals.
Alfred North WhiteheadThat knowledge which adds greatness to character is knowledge so handled as to transform every phase of immediate experience.
Alfred North WhiteheadNo 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 WhiteheadThe ideas of Freud were popularized by people who only imperfectly understood them, who were incapable of the great effort required to grasp them in their relationship to larger truths, and who therefore assigned to them a prominence out of all proportion to their true importance.
Alfred North Whitehead