Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

All practical teachers know that education is a patient process of mastery of details, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day.

Science repudiates philosophy. In other words, it has never cared to justify its truth or explain its meaning.

War can protect; it cannot create.

Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness.

Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas.

Algebra reverses the relative importance of the factors in ordinary language.

Seek simplicity but distrust it.

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order. Life refuses to be embalmed alive. The more prolonged the halt in some unrelieved system of order, the greater the crash of the dead society.

The worth of men consists in their liability to persuasion. They can persuade and can be persuaded by the disclosure of alternatives, the better and the worse. Civilization is the maintenance of social order, by its own inherent persuasiveness as embodying the nobler alternative. The recourse to force, however, unavoidable, is a disclosure of the failure of civilization, either in the general society or in a remnant of individuals. Thus in a live civilization there is always an element of unrest.

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

The task of a university is the creation of the future, so far as rational thought and civilized modes of appreciation can affect the issue.

Peace is self-control at its widest-at the width where the "self" has been lost, and interest has been transferred to coordinations wider than personality.

Other nations of different habits are not enemies: they are godsends. Men require of their neighbours something sufficiently akin to be understood, something sufficiently different to provoke attention, and something great enough to command admiration. We must not expect, however, all the virtues.

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

The teleology of the Universe is directed to the production of Beauty... The type of Truth required for the final stretch of Beauty is a discovery and not a recapitulation... Apart from Beauty, Truth is neither good, nor bad... Truth matters because of beauty.

Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure.

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.

It is the business of future to be dangerous.... The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur.

A man of science doesn't discover in order to know, he wants to know in order to discover.

There is only one subject matter for education, and that is Life in all its manifestations

Great dreamers' dreams are never fulfilled, they are always transcended.

In the history of the world the prize has not gone to those species which specialized in methods of violence, or even in defensive armor. In fact, nature began with producing animals encased in hard shells for defense against the ill of life. But smaller animals, without external armor, warm-blooded, sensitive, alert, have cleared those monsters off the face of the earth.

The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment... We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this great science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it.

We think of the number "five" as applying to appropriate groups of any entities whatsoever - to five fishes, five children, five apples, five days... We are merely thinking of those relationships between those two groups which are entirely independent of the individual essences of any of the members of either group. This is a very remarkable feat of abstraction; and it must have taken ages for the human race to rise to it

Error is the price we pay for progress.

No reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the ground of rationality.

The vigor of civilized societies is preserved by the widespread sense that high aims are worth-while.

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.

We must produce a great age, or see the collapse of the upward striving of our race.

Life is complex in its expression, involving more than percipience, namely desire, emotion, will, and feeling.

Many a scientist has patiently designed experiments for the purpose of substantiating his belief that animal operations are motivated by no purposes. He has perhaps spent his spare time in writing articles to prove that human beings are as other animals so that 'purpose' is a category irrelevant for the explanation of their bodily activities, his own activities included. Scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study.

Disputing the commonsense notion that all events require the prior existence of some underlying matter or substance. There is no antecedent static cabinet.

Algebra reverses the relative importance of the factors in ordinary language. It is essentially a written language, and it endeavors to exemplify in its written structures the patterns which it is its purpose to convey. The pattern of the marks on paper is a particular instance of the pattern to be conveyed to thought. The algebraic method is our best approach to the expression of necessity, by reason of its reduction of accident to the ghostlike character of the real variable.

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

It is impossible to meditate on time and the mystery of nature without an overwhelming emotion at the limitations of human intelligence.

"One and one make two" assumes that the changes in the shift of circumstance are unimportant. But it is impossible for us to analyze this notion of unimportant change.

In order to acquire learning, we must first shake ourselves free of it.

Civilizations can only be understood by those who are civilized.

You cannot be wise without some basis of knowledge, but you may easily acquire knowledge and remain bare of wisdom.

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

No science can be more secure than the unconscious metaphysics which tacitly it presupposes.

Governments are best classified by considering who are the 'somebodies' they are in fact endeavouring to satisfy.

The importance of an individual thinker owes something to chance. For it depends upon the fate of his ideas in the minds of his successors.

Problems are only opportunities in disquise.

The great achievements of the past were the adventures of the past. Only the adventurous can understand the greatness of the past.

Education with inert ideas is not only useless; it is above all things harmful.

Seek simplicity, and distrust it.

Philosophy is the product of wonder.