Alfred North Whitehead Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Alfred North Whitehead on Wise Famous Quotes.
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.
The aims of scientific thought are to see the general in the particular and the eternal in the transitory.
Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness. Thus religion is solitariness; and if you are never solitary, you are never religious.
The difference between ancients and moderns is that the ancients asked what have we experienced, and moderns asked what can we experience.
Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.
Each generation criticizes the unconscious assumptions made by its parent. It may assent to them, but it brings them out in the open.
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.
Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.
You cannot be wise without some basis of knowledge, but you may easily acquire knowledge and remain bare of wisdom.
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.
Change' is the description of the adventures of eternal objects in the evolving universe of actual things.
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.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
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.
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.
It belongs to the self-respect of intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final unravelment.
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.
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 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.