Alfred North Whitehead quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Alfred North Whitehead

Alfred North Whitehead Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Alfred North Whitehead on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

Speak out in acts; the time for words has passed, and only deeds will suffice.

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

The degeneracy of mankind is distinguished from its uprise by the dominance of chill abstractions, divorced from aesthetic content.

We think in generalities, but we live in details.

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

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

Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness. Thus religion is solitariness; and if you are never solitary, you are never religious.

Do not teach too many subjects and what you teach, teach thoroughly.

The pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit.

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

We must produce a great age, or see the collapse of the upward striving of our race.

Knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows.

Error itself may be happy chance.

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

The chief danger to philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence.

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

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

Each generation criticizes the unconscious assumptions made by its parent. It may assent to them, but it brings them out in the open.

The chief error in philosophy is overstatement.

God is the unlimited conceptual realization of the absolute wealth of potentiality.

Civilizations can only be understood by those who are civilized.

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

My criticism of Hegel procedure is that when in his discussion he arrives at a contradiction, he construes it as a crisis in the universe.

Governments are best classified by considering who are the "somebodies" they are in fact endeavoring to satisfy.

Philosophy is the product of wonder.

Great dreamers' dreams are never fulfilled, they are always transcended.

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

All of Western philosophy is but a footnote to Plato.

You cannot be wise without some basis of knowledge, but you may easily acquire knowledge and remain bare of wisdom.

The many become one and are increased by one.

Religion increasingly is tending to degenerate into a decent formula wherewith to embellish a comfortable life.

It is impossible to meditate on time and the mystery of nature without an overwhelming emotion at the limitations of human intelligence.

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

Change' is the description of the adventures of eternal objects in the evolving universe of actual things.

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

How the past perishes is how the future becomes.

It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression.

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.

Religion is what a person does in his solitariness.

Everything of importance has already been seen by someone who did not discover it.

The real history does not get written, because it is not in people's brains but in their nerves and vitals.

The physical doctrine of the atom has got into a state which is strongly suggestive of the epicycles of astronomy before Copernicus .

The great achievements of the past were the adventures of the past. Only the adventurous can understand the greatness of the past.

Every really new idea looks crazy at first.

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

Algebra is the intellectual instrument which has been created for rendering clear the quantitative aspects of the world.

The human body is an instrument for the production of art in the life of the human soul.

[In many circumstances,] the most important thing about a proposition is not that it be true, but that it be interesting.

The vigor of civilized societies is preserved by the widespread sense that high aims are worth-while.

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

The worship of God is not a rule of safety - it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable.

Without adventure all civilization is full of decay. Adventure rarely reaches its predetermined end. Columbus never reached China.

Intolerance is the besetting sin of moral fervour.

No reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the ground of rationality.

Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.

Man can acquire accomplishments or he can become an animal, whichever he wants. God makes the animals, man makes himself.

One main factor in the upward trend of animal life has been the power of wandering.

The term many presupposes the term one , and the term one presupposes the term many.

No science can be more secure than the unconscious metaphysics which tacitly it presupposes.

In order to acquire learning, we must first shake ourselves free of it.

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

Nature is probably quite indifferent to the aesthetic preferences of mathematicians.

Simple solutions seldom are. It takes a very unusual mind to undertake analysis of the obvious.

The defense of morals is the battle-cry which best rallies stupidity against change.

Life is the enjoyment of emotion, derived from the past and aimed at the future.

Nature, even in the act of satisfying anticipation, often provides a surprise.

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

We cannot think first and act afterwards. From the moment of birth we are immersed in action and can only guide it by taking thought.

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

Every epoch has its character determined by the way its population reacts to the material events which they encounter.

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

There is only one subject matter for education, and that is Life in all its manifestations

Vigorous societies harbor a certain extravagance of objectives, so that men wander beyond the safe provision of personal gratifications.

We must not expect simple answers to far-reaching questions. However far our gaze penetrates, there are always heights beyond which block our vision.

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

Knowledge keeps no better than fish.

Dogmatism is the anti-Christ of learning.

Error is the price we pay for progress.

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

A man of science doesn't discover in order to know, he wants to know in order to discover.

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

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

No Roman ever died in contemplation over a geometrical diagram.

You cannot evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music, and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves.

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

When success turns a man's head he faces failure

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

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

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.

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.

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

Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure.

The point about zero is that we do not need to use it in the operation of daily life. No one goes out to buy zero fish.

It is not paradox to say that in our most theoretical moods we may be nearest to our most practical applications.

That knowledge which adds greatness to character is knowledge so handled as to transform every phase of immediate experience.

Common sense is genius in homespun.

Vigorous societies harbour a certain extravagance of objectives.

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

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