Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

Through and through the world is infested with quantity: To talk sense is to talk quantities. It is no use saying the nation is large. . . . How large? It is no use saying the radium is scarce. . . . How scarce? You cannot evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music, and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves.

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.

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

In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as it were a mist, cloaking the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions.

People make the mistake of talking about 'natural laws.' There are no natural laws. There are only temporary habits of nature.

Value is coextensive with reality.

Identification of rhythm as the casual counterpart of life; wherever there is some life, only perceptible to us when the analogies are sufficiently close.

But you can catch yourself entertaining habitually certain ideas and setting others aside; and that, I think, is where our personal destinies are largely decided.

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

Common sense is genius in homespun.

The world is shocked, or amused, by the sight of saintly old people hindering in the name of morality the removal of obvious brutalities from a legal system.

The vigour of civilised societies is preserved by the widespread sense that high aims are worth while. Vigorous societies harbour a certain extravagance of objectives, so that men wander beyond the safe provision of personal gratifications. All strong interests easily become impersonal, the love of a good job well done. There is a sense of harmony about such an accomplishment, the Peace brought by something worth while. Such personal gratification arises from aim beyond personality.

To see what is general in what is particular, and what is permanent in what is transitory, is the aim of scientific thought.

Great people plant trees they'll never sit under.

Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.

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

I will not go so far as to say that to construct a history of thought without profound study of the mathematical ideas of successive epochs is like omitting Hamlet from the play which is named after him. That would be claiming too much. But it is certainly analogous to cutting out the part of Ophelia. This simile is singularly exact. For Ophelia is quite essential to the play, she is very charming . . . and a little mad.

Without adventure civilization is in full decay.

Philosophy asks the simple question: What is it all about?

There is no greater hindrance to the progress of thought than an attitude of irritated party-spirit.

Nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent, the nightingale for its song; and the sun for its radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves and should turn them into odes of self congratulation on the excellence of the human mind.

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.

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

I am sure that one secret of a successful teacher is that he has formulated quite clearly in his mind what the pupil has got to know in precise fashion. He will then cease from half-hearted attempts to worry his pupils with memorizing a lot of irrelevant stuff of inferior importance.

The motive of success is not enough.

The result of teaching small parts of a large number of subjects is the passive reception of disconnected ideas, not illumed with any spark of vitality.

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.

The fact of the religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience.

Education should turn out the pupil with something he knows well and something he can do well.

Almost all new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.

The consequences of a plethora of half-digested theoretical knowledge are deplorable.

Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct form ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.

To be an abstraction does not mean that an entity is nothing. It merely means that its existence is only a factor of a more concrete element of nature.

The fixed person for the fixed duties who in older societies was such a godsend, in future will be a public danger.

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

Every really new idea looks crazy at first.

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

The difference between ancients and moderns is that the ancients asked what have we experienced, and moderns asked what can we experience.

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

There will be some fundamental assumptions which adherents of all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them. With these assumptions a certain limited number of types of philosophic systems are possible, and this group of systems constitutes the philosophy of the epoch.

The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, seek simplicity and distrust it.

Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure, a sense of nothing having been done before, of complete freedom to experiment.

The whole of mathematics consists in the organization of a series of aids to the imagination in the process of reasoning.

The vastest knowledge of today cannot transcend the buddhi of the Rishis in ancient India; and science in its most advanced stage now is closer to Vedanta than ever before.

It belongs to the self-respect of intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final unravelment.

There is a tradition of opposition between adherents of induction and of deduction. In my view it would be just as sensible for the two ends of a worm to quarrel.

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

Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within, the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realised; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest.