Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language.

A science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost.

The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things.

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

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

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.

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

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

Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.

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

In the conditions of modern life the rule is absolute, the race which does not value trained intelligence is doomed.

Vigorous societies harbour a certain extravagance of objectives.

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.

Knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows.

The only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present.

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.

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

It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious.

A civilized society is one that exhibits the five qualities of truth beauty adventure art and peace.

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.

How the past perishes is how the future becomes.

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.

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

We think in generalities but we live in detail.

Fools act on imagination without knowledge pedants act on knowledge without imagination.

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.

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

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.

The total absence of humour in the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.

The major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur.

True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes but the firm resolve of virtue and reason.

Get your knowledge quickly and then use it. If you can use it you will retain it.

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

Life is an offensive directed against the repetitious mechanism of the universe.

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

The total absence of humour from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.

Religion is what an individual does with his solitariness.

In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory.

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.

Wisdom is the fruit of a balanced development.

True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes, but the firm resolve of virtue and reason.

The only justification in the use of force is to reduce the amount of force necessary to be used.

Not a sentence or a word is independent of the circumstances under which it is uttered.

Science is a river with two sources, the practical source and the theoretical source.

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.

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.

The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground for it is the past and it is the future.

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

Philosophy begins in wonder. And at the end when philosophic thought has done its best the wonder remains.

There are no whole truths. All truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.