Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

Every intellectual revolution which has ever stirred humanity into greatness has been a passionate protest against inert ideas. Then, alas, with pathetic ignorance of human psychology, it has proceeded by some educational scheme to bind humanity afresh with inert ideas of its own fashioning.

— Alfred North Whitehead

What the learned world tends to offer is one second-hand scrap of information illustrating ideas derived from another second-hand scrap of information. The second-handedness of the learned world is the secret of its mediocrity.

— Alfred North Whitehead

The main importance of Francis Bacon’s influence does not lie in any peculiar theory of inductive reasoning which he happened to express, but in the revolt against second-hand information of which he was a leader.

— Alfred North Whitehead

There remains the final reflection, how shallow, puny, and imperfect are efforts to sound the depths in the nature of things. In philosophical discussion, the merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement is an exhibition of folly.

— Alfred North Whitehead

The chief error in philosophy is overstatement.

— Alfred North Whitehead

Rationalism is an adventure in the clarification of thought.

— Alfred North Whitehead

Our habitual experience is a complex of failure and success in the enterprise of interpretation. If we desire a record of uninterpreted experience, we must ask a stone to record its autobiography.

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

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.

— Alfred North Whitehead

The ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction.

— Alfred North Whitehead

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

— Alfred North Whitehead

Without doubt, if we are to go back to that ultimate, integral experience, unwarped by the sophistications of theory, that experience whose elucidation is the final aim of philosophy, the flux of things is one ultimate generalization around which we must weave our philosophical system.

— 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 oneness of the universe, and the oneness of each element of the universe, repeat themselves to the crack of doom in the creative advance from creature to creature, each creature including in itself the whole of history and exemplifying the self-identity of things and their mutual diversities.

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

The theme of Cosmology, which is the basis of all religions, is the story of the dynamic effort of the World passing into everlasting unity, and of the static majesty of God's vision, accomplishing its purpose of completion by absorption of the World's multiplicity of effort.

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

Some philosophers fail to distinguish propositions from judgments; … But 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.

— Alfred North Whitehead

There is nothing in the real world which is merely an inert fact. Every reality is there for feeling: it promotes feeling; and it is felt.

— Alfred North Whitehead

A precise language awaits a completed metaphysics.

— Alfred North Whitehead

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.

— Alfred North Whitehead

Thus the universe is to be conceived as attaining the active self-expression of its own variety of opposites of its own freedom and its own necessity, of its own multiplicity and its own unity, of its own imperfection and its own perfection. All the opposites are elements in the nature of things, and are incorrigibly there. The concept of God is the way in which we understand this incredible fact that what cannot be, yet is.

— Alfred North Whitehead

Error is the price we pay for progress.

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

Whether or no it be for the general good, life is robbery. It is at this point that with life morals become acute. The robber requires justification.

— Alfred North Whitehead

For the kingdom of heaven is with us today.

— Alfred North Whitehead

No member of a crew is praised for the rugged individuality of his rowing.

— Alfred North Whitehead

The mentality of mankind and the language of mankind created each other. If we like to assume the rise of language as a given fact, then it is not going too far to say that the souls of men are the gift from language to mankind. The account of the sixth day should be written: He gave them speech, and they became souls.

— Alfred North Whitehead

Intolerance is the besetting sin of moral fervour.

— Alfred North Whitehead

In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as if it were a mist, cloaking the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reasoning grasps at straws for premises and float on gossamer for deductions.

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

Systems, scientific and philosophic, come and go. Each method of limited understanding is at length exhausted. In its prime each system is a triumphant success: in its decay it is an obstructive nuisance.

— Alfred North Whitehead

The deliberate aim at Peace very easily passes into its bastard substitute, Anesthesia.

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

A general definition of civilization: a civilized society is exhibiting the five qualities of truth, beauty, adventure, art, peace.

— 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

I have always noticed that deeply and truly religious persons are fond of a joke, and I am suspicious of those who aren’t.

— 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

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

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.

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of human life is to grasp as much as we can out of the infinitude.

— Alfred North Whitehead

A culture is in its finest flower before it begins to analyze itself.

— 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

The ideas of Freud were popularized by people who only imperfectly understood them, who were incapable of the great effort required to grasp them in their relationship to larger truths, and who therefore assigned to them a prominence out of all proportion to their true importance.

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

A philosopher of imposing stature doesn't think in a vacuum. Even his most abstract ideas are, to some extent, conditioned by what is or is not known in the time when he lives.

— Alfred North Whitehead

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.

— Alfred North Whitehead

Ninety percent of our lives is governed by emotion. Our brains merely register and act upon what is telegraphed to them by our bodily experience. Intellect is to emotion as our clothes are to our bodies; we could not very well have civilized life without clothes, but we would be in a poor way if we had only clothes without bodies.

— Alfred North Whitehead

No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it.

— Alfred North Whitehead

The English never abolish anything. They put it in cold storage.

— Alfred North Whitehead

Shakespeare wrote better poetry for not knowing too much; Milton, I think, knew too much finally for the good of his poetry.

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

Knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows.

— Alfred North Whitehead

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.

— 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

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious.

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— 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

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

By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and in effect increases the mental power of the race.

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

In its solitariness the spirit asks, What, in the way of value, is the attainment of life? And it can find no such value till it has merged its individual claim with that of the objective universe. Religion is world-loyalty.

— Alfred North Whitehead

There is a quality of life which lies always beyond the mere fact of life; and when we include the quality in the fact, there is still omitted the quality of the quality.

— 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

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

We do not require elaborate training merely in order to refrain from embarking upon intricate trains of inference. Such abstinence is only too easy.

— Alfred North Whitehead

Scientists, animated by the purpose of proving they are purposeless, constitute an interesting subject for study.

— Alfred North Whitehead

Nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent, the nightingale for its song, and the sun for its radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves and should turn them into odes of self-congratulation on the excellence of the human mind.

— Alfred North Whitehead

Philosophy, in one of its functions, is the critic of cosmologies. It is its function to harmonise, refashion, and justify divergent intuitions as to the nature of things. It has to insist on the scrutiny of the ultimate ideas, and on the retention of the whole of the evidence in shaping our cosmological scheme. Its business is to render explicit, and — so far as may be — efficient, a process which otherwise is unconsciously performed without rational tests.

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

The worst that happened to men of science was that Galileo suffered an honorable detention and a mild reproof, before dying peacefully in his bed.

— Alfred North Whitehead

More and more it is becoming evident that what the West can most readily give to the East is its science and its scientific outlook. This is transferable from country to country, and from race to race, wherever there is a rational society.

— Alfred North Whitehead

The science of pure mathematics, in its modern developments, may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit.

— Alfred North Whitehead

Mathematics as an Element in the History of Thought.

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science. Its principles may be eternal, but the expression of those principles requires continual development.

— Alfred North Whitehead

...The modern fading of interest in religion.

— Alfred North Whitehead

Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind and within the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realized; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest.

— Alfred North Whitehead

The fact of the religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience.

— Alfred North Whitehead

The power of God is the worship He inspires.... The worship of God is not a rule of safety — it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable. The death of religion comes with the repression of the high hope of adventure.

— Alfred North Whitehead

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.

— Alfred North Whitehead

Nothing is more impressive than the fact that as mathematics withdrew increasingly into the upper regions of ever greater extremes of abstract thought, it returned back to earth with a corresponding growth of importance for the analysis of concrete fact. ...The paradox is now fully established that the utmost abstractions are the true weapons with which to control our thought of concrete fact.

— Alfred North Whitehead

Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilisation of knowledge.

— Alfred North Whitehead

For successful education there must always be a certain freshness in the knowledge dealt with. It must be either new in itself or invested with some novelty of application to the new world of new times. Knowledge does not keep any better than fish. You may be dealing with knowledge of the old species, with some old truth; but somehow it must come to the students, as it were, just drawn out of the sea and with the freshness of its immediate importance.

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

The consequences of a plethora of half-digested theoretical knowledge are deplorable.

— Alfred North Whitehead