Alfred north whitehead quotes

Learning preserves the errors of the past as well as its wisdom.

The merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth.

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

When you're average, you're just as close to the bottom as you are the top.

Nobody has a right to speak more clearly than he thinks.

The future belongs to those who can rise above the confines of the earth.

Every organism requires an environment of friends, partly to shield it from violent changes, and partly to supply it with its wants.

It is the business of future to be dangerous.... The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur.

Religion is the reaction of human nature to its search for God.

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

Knowledge keeps no better than fish.

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

Great people plant trees they'll never sit under.

Wisdom alone is true ambition's aim, wisdom is the source of virtue and of fame; obtained with labour, for mankind employed, and then, when most you share it, best enjoyed.

No religion can be considered in abstraction from its followers, or even from its various types of followers.

If a dog jumps into your lap, it is because he is fond of you; but if a cat does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer.

Symbolism is no mere idle fancy or corrupt degeneration: it is inherent in the very texture of human life.

Aristotle discovered all the half-truths which were necessary to the creation of science.

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

Everyone is a philosopher. Not everyone is good at it.

The vastest knowledge of today cannot transcend the buddhi of the Rishis in ancient India; and science in its most advanced stage now is closer to Vedanta than ever before.

The ultimate metaphysical ground is the creative advance into novelty.

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

I am sure that one secret of a successful teacher is that he has formulated quite clearly in his mind what the pupil has got to know in precise fashion. He will then cease from half-hearted attempts to worry his pupils with memorizing a lot of irrelevant stuff of inferior importance.

Systems, scientific or 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.

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

In all education the main cause of failure is staleness.

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

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.

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

Intolerance is the besetting sin of moral fervour.

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.

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

In a sense, knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows, for details are swallowed up in principles. The details for knowledge which are important, will be picked up ad hoc in each avocation of life, but the habit of the active utilization of well-understood principles is the final possession of WISDOM.

Vedanta is the most impressive metaphysics the human mind has conceived.

The motive of success is not enough.

Problems are only opportunities in disquise.

Peace is self-control at its widest-at the width where the "self" has been lost, and interest has been transferred to coordinations wider than personality.

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

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

Knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows.

Each human being is a more complex structure than any social system to which he belongs.

Thus the negative perception is the triumph of consciousness.

How the past perishes is how the future becomes.

From the very beginning of his education, the child should experience the joy of discovery.

Great art is more than a transient refreshment. It is something which adds to the permanent richness of the soul's self-attainment. It justifies itself both by its immediate enjoyment, and also by its discipline of the inmost being. Its discipline is not distinct from enjoyment but by reason of it. It transforms the soul into the permanent realization of values extending beyond its former self.

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

Ninety percent of our lives is governed by emotion.

The vitality of thought is in adventure. Idea's won't keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervour, live for it, and, if need be, die for it. Their inheritors receive the idea, perhaps now strong and successful, but without inheriting the fervour; so the idea settles down to a comfortable middle age, turns senile, and dies.

An open mind is all very well in its way, but it ought not to be so open that there is no keeping anything in or out of it.

Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science.

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. The social machine should run like clockwork.

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

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

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

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

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.

Without adventure civilization is in full decay.

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

The tragedy of the world is that those who are imaginative have but slight experience, and those who are experienced have feeble imaginations.

I put forward as a general definition of civilization, that a civilized society is exhibiting the five qualities of Truth, Beauty, Adventure, Art, Peace.

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

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

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

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

Religion is what a person does in his solitariness.

It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious.

The essence of Christianity is the appeal to the life of Christ as a revelation of the nature of God and of God's agency in the world. The record is fragmentary, inconsistent, and uncertain. . . . But there can be no doubt as to what elements in the record have evoked a response from all that is best in human nature. The Mother, the Child, and the bare manger: the lowly man, homeless and self-forgetful, with his message of peace, love, and sympathy: the suffering, the agony, the tender words as life ebbed, the final despair: and the whole with the authority of supreme victory.

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

The foundations of the world are to be found, not in the cognitive experience of conscious thought, but in the aesthetic experience of everyday life.

Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.

Inventive genius requires pleasurable mental activity as a condition for its vigorous exercise. "Necessity is the mother of invention" is a silly proverb. "Necessity is the mother of futile dodges" is much closer to the truth. The basis of growth of modern invention is science, and science is almost wholly the outgrowth of pleasurable intellectual curiosity.

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

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

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

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.

Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them.

Dogmatism is the anti-Christ of learning.

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

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 chief error in philosophy is overstatement.

It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

What we perceive as the present is the vivid fringe of memory tinged with anticipation.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Some of the finest moral intuitions come to quite humble people. The visiting of lofty ideas doesn't depend on formal schooling.

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.

Philosophy is the product of wonder.

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 teleology of the Universe is directed to the production of Beauty... The type of Truth required for the final stretch of Beauty is a discovery and not a recapitulation... Apart from Beauty, Truth is neither good, nor bad... Truth matters because of beauty.

People make the mistake of talking about 'natural laws.' There are no natural laws. There are only temporary habits of nature.

We think in generalities, but we live in detail.

There are no whole truths: All truths are half-truths.

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

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

Value is coextensive with reality.

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

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

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

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

The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanation 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.''

God is in the world, or nowhere, creating continually in us and around us. Insofar as man partakes of this creative process does he partake of the divine, of God, and that participation is his immortality.

The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature throughout the centuries is the notion of 'independent existence.' There is no such mode of existence; every entity is to be understood in terms of the way it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.

As society is now constituted, a literal adherence to the moral precepts scattered throughout the Gospels would mean sudden death.

It is impossible not to feel stirred at the thought of the emotions of man at certain historic moments of adventure and discovery - Columbus when he first saw the Western shore, Pizarro when he stared at the Pacific Ocean, Franklin when the electric spark came from the string of his kite, Galileo when he first turned his telescope to the heavens. Such moments are also granted to students in the abstract regions of thought, and high among them must be placed the morning when Descartes lay in bed and invented the method of co-ordinate geometry.

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

Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure.

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

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Error is the price we pay for progress.

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.

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.

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

The world is shocked, or amused, by the sight of saintly old people hindering in the name of morality the removal of obvious brutalities from a legal system.

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

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

I consider Christianity to be one of the great disasters of the human race... It would be impossible to imagine anything more un - Christianlike than theology.

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

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

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