Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

300 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

Alfred North Whitehead
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. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle — they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.

Alfred North Whitehead
Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative, which never emerges explicitly into its trains of reasoning.

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
Familiar things happen, and mankind does not bother about them. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

Alfred North Whitehead
We think of the number "five" as applying to appropriate groups of any entities whatsoever - to five fishes, five children, five apples, five days... We are merely thinking of those relationships between those two groups which are entirely independent of the individual essences of any of the members of either group. This is a very remarkable feat of abstraction; and it must have taken ages for the human race to rise to it

Alfred North Whitehead
The self-satisfied dogmatism with which mankind at each period of its history cherishes the delusion of the finality of existing modes of knowledge.

Alfred North Whitehead
Logic, properly used, does not shackle thought. It gives freedom, and above all, boldness. Illogical thought hesitates to draw conclusions, because it never knows either what it means, or what it assumes, or how far it trusts its own assumptions, or what will be the effect of any modification of assumptions.

Alfred North Whitehead
If the law states a precise result, almost certainly it is not precisely accurate; and thus even at the best the result, precisely as calculated, is not likely to occur.

Alfred North Whitehead
There can be no true physical science which looks first to mathematics for the provision of a conceptual model. Such a procedure is to repeat the errors of the logicians of the middle ages.

Alfred North Whitehead
Neither logic without observation, nor observation without logic, can move one step in the formation of science.

Alfred North Whitehead
It is the large generalisation, limited by a happy particularity, which is the fruitful conception.

Alfred North Whitehead
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
Positivistic science is solely concerned with observed fact, and must hazard no conjecture as to the future. If observed fact be all we know, then there is no other knowledge. Probability is relative to knowledge. There is no probability as to the future within the doctrine of Positivism.

Alfred North Whitehead
Science is simply setting out on a fishing expedition to see whether it cannot find some procedure which it can call measurement of space and some procedure which it can call the measurement of time, and something which it can call a system of forces, and something which it can call masses..

Alfred North Whitehead
Symbolic Logic has been disowned by many logicians on the plea that its interest is mathematical, and by many mathematicians on the plea that its interest is logical.

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
In order that a mathematical science of any importance may be founded upon conventional definitions, the entities created by them must have properties which bear some affinity to the properties of existing things.

Alfred North Whitehead
Science is either an important statement of systematic theory correlating observations of a common world or is the daydream of a solitary intelligence with a taste for the daydream of publication.

Alfred North Whitehead
We habitually observe by the method of difference. Sometimes we see an elephant, and sometimes we do not. The result is that an elephant, when present, is noticed.

Alfred North Whitehead
Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it. A merely well informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth.

Alfred North Whitehead
A chain of facts is like a barrier reef. On one side there is wreckage, and beyond it harborage and safety.

Alfred North Whitehead
The antithesis between a technical and a liberal education is fallacious. There can be no adequate technical education which is not liberal, and no liberal education which is not technical.

Alfred North Whitehead
Apart from time there is no meaning for purpose, hope, fear, energy. If there be no historic process, then everything is what it is, namely, a mere fact. Life and motion are lost.

Alfred North Whitehead
Science suggests a cosmology; and whatever suggests a cosmology suggests a religion.

Alfred North Whitehead
Too many apples from the tree of systematized knowledge lead to the fall of progress.

Alfred North Whitehead
On the absolute theory, bare space and bare time are such very odd existences, half something and half nothing.

Alfred North Whitehead
Art heightens the sense of humanity. It gives an elation to feeling which is supernatural...A million sunsets will not spur us on towards civilization. It requires Art to evoke into consciousness the finite perfections which lie ready for human achievement.

Alfred North Whitehead