Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

Order is not sufficient. What is required, is something much more complex. It is order entering upon novelty; so that the massiveness of order does not degenerate into mere repetition; and so that the novelty is always reflected upon a background of system.

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.

Religion is what a person does in his solitariness.

Ninety percent of our lives is governed by emotion.

In a sense, knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows: for details are swallowed up in principles.

There is no nature at an instant.

I consider Christian theology to be one of the great disasters of the human race.

Style, in its finest sense, is the last acquirement of the educated mind; it is also the most useful. It pervades the whole being.

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

Aristotle discovered all the half-truths which were necessary to the creation of science.

As society is now constituted, a literal adherence to the moral precepts scattered throughout the Gospels would mean sudden death.

The justification for a university is that it preserves the connection between knowledge and the zest of life, by uniting the young and the old in the imaginative consideration of learning.

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.

The aims of scientific thought are to see the general in the particular and the eternal in the transitory.

In every age of well-marked transition, there is the pattern of habitual dumb practice and emotion which is passing and there is oncoming a new complex of habit.

How the past perishes is how the future becomes.

Knowledge is always accompanied with accessories of emotion and purpose.

In a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world

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

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

If you have had your attention directed to the novelties in thought in your own lifetime, you will have observed that almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced, and almost any idea which jogs you out of your current abstractions may be better than nothing.

Nobody has a right to speak more clearly than he thinks.

The race that does not value trained intelligence is doomed.

The worst that happened to men of science was that Galileo suffered an honorable detention and a mild reproof, before dying peacefully in his bed.

The paradox is now fully established that the utmost abstractions are the true weapons with which to control our thought of concrete fact.

The future belongs to those who can rise above the confines of the earth.

Whenever a text-book is written of real educational worth, you may be quite certain that some reviewer will say that it will be difficult to teach from it. Of course it will be difficult to teach from it. It it were easy, the book ought to be burned.

It does not matter what men say in words, so long as their activities are controlled by settled instincts. The words may ultimately destroy the instincts; but until this has occurred, words do not count.

The 'silly question' is the first intimation of some totally novel development.

Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity.

We think in generalities, but we live in detail.

Youth is life as yet unblemished by much tragedy, but hardly by TV.

The vitality of thought is in adventure. Idea's won't keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervour, live for it, and, if need be, die for it. Their inheritors receive the idea, perhaps now strong and successful, but without inheriting the fervour; so the idea settles down to a comfortable middle age, turns senile, and dies.

Some of the finest moral intuitions come to quite humble people. The visiting of lofty ideas doesn't depend on formal schooling.

Mathematics as a science, commenced when first someone, probably a Greek, proved propositions about "any" things or about "some" things, without specifications of definite particular things.

Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions.

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

With the sense of sight, the idea communicates the emotion, whereas, with sound, the emotion communicates the idea, which is more direct and therefore more powerful.

Heaven knows what seeming nonsense may not tomorrow be demonstrated truth.

What the learned world tends to offer is one second-hand scrap of information illustrating ideas derived from another second-hand scrap of information. The second-handedness of the learned world is the secret of its mediocrity.

The way in which the persecution of Galileo has been remembered is a tribute to the quiet commencement of the most intimate change in outlook which the human race had yet encountered. Since a babe was born in a manger, it may be doubted whether so great a thing has happened with so little stir

Imagination is not to be divorced from the facts. It is a way of illuminating the facts.

It is the business of the future to be dangerous; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties.

It is impossible not to feel stirred at the thought of the emotions of man at certain historic moments of adventure and discovery - Columbus when he first saw the Western shore, Pizarro when he stared at the Pacific Ocean, Franklin when the electric spark came from the string of his kite, Galileo when he first turned his telescope to the heavens. Such moments are also granted to students in the abstract regions of thought, and high among them must be placed the morning when Descartes lay in bed and invented the method of co-ordinate geometry.

So far as the mere imparting of information is concerned, no university has had any justification for existence since the popularization of printing in the fifteenth century.

From the moment of birth we are immersed in action, and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought.

Systems, scientific or philosophic, come and go. Each method of limited understanding is at length exhausted. In its prime each system is a triumphant success: in its decay it is an obstructive nuisance.

The merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth.