Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

Alfred North Whitehead
When we consider what religion is for mankind, and what science is, it is no exaggeration to say that the future course of history depends upon the decision of this generation as to the relations between them.

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

Alfred North Whitehead
A few generations ago the clergy, or to speak more accurately, large sections of the clergy were the standing examples of obscurantism. Today their place has been taken by scientists.

Alfred North Whitehead
Learning preserves the errors of the past, as well as its wisdom. For this reason, dictionaries are public dangers, although they are necessities.

Alfred North Whitehead
The result of teaching small parts of a large number of subjects is the passive reception of disconnected ideas, not illumed with any spark of vitality.

Alfred North Whitehead
Identification of rhythm as the casual counterpart of life; wherever there is some life, only perceptible to us when the analogies are sufficiently close.

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

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

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

Alfred North Whitehead
The only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present. The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground; for it is the past, and it is the future.

Alfred North Whitehead
The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation.

Alfred North Whitehead
Nature can be thought of as a closed system whose mutual relations do not require the expression of the fact that they are thought about.

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
All science as it grows toward perfection becomes mathematical in its ideas.

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