Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.
Alfred North Whitehead
A man really writes for an audience of about ten persons. Of course if others like it that is clear gain. But if those ten are satisfied he is content.
Alfred North Whitehead
Routine is the god of every social system it is the seventh heaven of business the essential component in the success of every factory the ideal of every statesman.
Alfred North Whitehead
There are no whole truths. All truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.
Alfred North Whitehead
We think in generalities but we live in detail.
Alfred North Whitehead
The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground for it is the past and it is the future.
Alfred North Whitehead
How the past perishes is how the future becomes.
Alfred North Whitehead
The only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present.
Alfred North Whitehead
The total absence of humour in the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.
Alfred North Whitehead
Vigorous societies harbour a certain extravagance of objectives.
Alfred North Whitehead
A science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost.
Alfred North Whitehead
It is the business of the future to be dangerous.
Alfred North Whitehead
The major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur.
Alfred North Whitehead
The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.
Alfred North Whitehead
The only justification in the use of force is to reduce the amount of force necessary to be used.
Alfred North Whitehead
It takes a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.
Alfred North Whitehead
The major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur.
Alfred North Whitehead
The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.
Alfred North Whitehead
The only justification in the use of force is to reduce the amount of force necessary to be used.
Alfred North Whitehead
We think in generalities but we live in detail.
Alfred North Whitehead
It takes a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.
Alfred North Whitehead
What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like and immorality is what they dislike.
Alfred North Whitehead
Life is an offensive directed against the repetitious mechanism of the universe.
Alfred North Whitehead
Some of the finest moral intuitions come to quite humble people. The visiting of lofty ideas doesn't depend on formal schooling. Think of those Galilean peasants.
Alfred North Whitehead
Fools act on imagination without knowledge pedants act on knowledge without imagination.
Alfred North Whitehead
Not ignorance but ignorance of ignorance is the death of knowledge.
Alfred North Whitehead
Ideas won't keep: something must be done about them.
Alfred North Whitehead
The total absence of humour from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.
Alfred North Whitehead
Every organism requires an environment of friends partly to shield it from violent changes and partly to supply it with its wants.
Alfred North Whitehead
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.
Alfred North Whitehead
Education with inert ideas is not only useless it is above all things harmful.
Alfred North Whitehead
The factor in human life provocative of a noble discontent is the gradual emergence of a sense of criticism founded upon appreciation of beauty and of intellectual distinction and of duty.
Alfred North Whitehead
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 ....
Alfred North Whitehead
True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes but the firm resolve of virtue and reason.
Alfred North Whitehead
Not a sentence or a word is independent of the circumstances under which it is uttered.
Alfred North Whitehead
A race preserves its vigour so long as it harbours a real contrast between what has been and what may be and so long as it is nerved by the vigour to adventure beyond the safeties of the past. Without adventure civilization is in full decay.
Alfred North Whitehead
A civilized society is one that exhibits the five qualities of truth beauty adventure art and peace.
Alfred North Whitehead
The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.
Alfred North Whitehead
From the moment of birth we are immersed in action and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought.
Alfred North Whitehead
The "silly" question is the first intimation of some totally new development
Alfred North Whitehead
The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things.
Alfred North Whitehead
Life is complex in its expression, involving more than percipience, namely desire, emotion, will, and feeling.
Alfred North Whitehead
We think in generalities, but we live in detail. To make the past live, we must perceive it in detail in addition to thinking of it in generalities.
Alfred North Whitehead
Religion is what an individual does with his solitariness.
Alfred North Whitehead
[Beware of] the fallacy of misplaced concreteness [mistaking an abstraction for concrete reality, for actuality] In the inescapable flux, there is something that abides; in the overwhelming permanence, there is an element that escapes into flux. Permanence can be snatched only out of flux; and the passing moment can find its adequate intensity only by its submission to permanence.Error is the price we pay for progress.In the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. The importance of truth is that it adds to interest.Creativity is the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact. It is that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively. It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity.The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, "Seek simplicity and distrust it."It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.[From various of Whitehead's books, not only PR]
Alfred North Whitehead
Let me here remind you that the essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things. This inevitableness of destiny can only be illustrated in terms of human life by incidents which in fact involve unhappiness. For it is by them that the futility of escape can be made evident in the drama. This remorseless inevitableness is what pervades scientific thought. The laws of physics are the decrees of fate.
Alfred North Whitehead
Rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality.Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing. The limitation, and the basis arising from what is already actual, are both of them necessary and interconnected.
Alfred North Whitehead
Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.
Alfred North Whitehead
Science is a river with two sources, the practical source and the theoretical source.
Alfred North Whitehead
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.
Alfred North Whitehead
Science is a river with two sources, the practical source and the theoretical source.
Alfred North Whitehead
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.
Alfred North Whitehead
The solution which I am urging is to eradicate the fatal disconnection of subjects which kills the vitality of our modern curriculum. There is only one subject-matter for education, and that is LIfe in all its manifestations. Instead of this single unity, we offer children--Algebra, from which nothing follows; Geometry, from which nothing follows; Science, from which nothing follows; History, from which nothing follows; a Couple of Languages, never mastered; and lastly, most dreary of all, Literature, represented by plays of Shakespeare, with philological notes and short analyses of plot and character to be in substance committed to memory. Can such a list be said to represent Life, as it is known in the midst of living it? The best that can be said of it is, that it is a rapid table of contents which a deity might run over in his mind while he was thinking of creating a world, and has not yet determined how to put it together
Alfred North Whitehead
Get your knowledge quickly and then use it. If you can use it you will retain it.
Alfred North Whitehead
A student should not be taught more than he can think about.
Alfred North Whitehead
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.
Alfred North Whitehead
In the conditions of modern life the rule is absolute, the race which does not value trained intelligence is doomed.
Alfred North Whitehead
Wisdom is the fruit of a balanced development.
Alfred North Whitehead
Religion carries two sorts of people in two entirely opposite directions: the mild and gentle people it carries towards mercy and justice; the persecuting people it carries into fiendish sadistic cruelty. Mind you, though this may seem to justify the eighteenth-century Age of Reason in its contention that religion is nothing but an organized, gigantic fraud and a curse to the human race, nothing could be farther from the truth. It possesses these two aspects, the evil one of the two appealing to people capable of naïve hatred; but what is actually happening is that when you get natures stirred to their depths over questions which they feel to be overwhelmingly vital, you get the bad stirred up in them as well as the good; the mud as well as the water. It doesn't seem to matter much which sect you have, for both types occur in all sects....
Alfred North Whitehead
The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, 'Seek simplicity and distrust it.
Alfred North Whitehead