Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

Rationalism is an adventure in the clarification of thought.

Human nature loses its most precious quality when it is robbed of its sense of things beyond, unexplored and yet insistent.

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

Great people plant trees they'll never sit under.

It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.

It is a safe rule to apply that, when a mathematical or philosophical author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense.

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

The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervor, live for it, and if need be, die for it.

Education which is not modern share the fate of all organic things which are kept too long.

Apart from God every activity is merely a passing whiff of insignificance.

The purpose of education is not to fill a vessel but to kindle a flame.

Without adventure civilization is in full decay.

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

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

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

A Unitarian is a person who believes in at most one God.

Civilizations can only be understood by those who are civilized.

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

Spoken language is merely a series of squeaks.

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

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.

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

Learning is often spoken of as if we are watching the open pages of all the books which we have ever read, and then, when occasion arises, we select the right page to read aloud to the universe.

Value is coextensive with reality.

Religion is what a person does in his solitariness.

After you understand about the sun and the stars and the rotation of the earth, you may still miss the radiance of the sunset.

Fertilization of the soul is the reason for the necessity of art.

Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.

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

A science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost.

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.

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.

Seek simplicity but distrust it.

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.

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

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

I always feel that I have two duties to perform with a parting guest: one, to see that he doesn't forget anything that is his; the other, to see that he doesn't take anything that is mine.

Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning.

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

The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention.

A clash of doctrine is not a disaster, it is an opportunity.

Common sense is genius in homespun.

Dogmatism is the anti-Christ of learning.

The ultimate metaphysical ground is the creative advance into novelty.

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

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

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

You think the world is what it looks like in fine weather at noon day; I think it is what it seems like in the early morning when one first wakes from deep sleep.

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

It is the business of the future to be dangerous.