Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

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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.

Alfred North Whitehead
Matter-of-fact is an abstraction, arrived at by confining thought to purely formal relations which then masquerade as the final reality. This is why science, in its perfection, relapses into the study of differential equations. The concrete world has slipped through the meshes of the scientific net.

Alfred North Whitehead
In the conditions of modern life the rule is absolute, the race which does not value trained intelligence is doomed. Not all your heroism, not all your social charm, not all your wit, not all your victories on land or at sea, can move back the finger of fate. To-day we maintain ourselves. To-morrow science will have moved forward yet one more step, and there will be no appeal from the judgment which will then be pronounced on the uneducated.

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

Alfred North Whitehead
What our students should learn is how to face the future with the aid of the past.

Alfred North Whitehead
Philosophy asks the simple question, What is it all about?

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

Alfred North Whitehead
Elegant intellects which despise the theory of quantity are but half developed.

Alfred North Whitehead
Even perfection will not bear the tedium of indefinite repetition.

Alfred North Whitehead
King James said, "No bishops, no king." With greater confidence we can say, "No logic, no science."

Alfred North Whitehead
Vigorous societies harbour a certain extravagance of objectives.

Alfred North Whitehead
Cosmology... restrains the aberrations of the mere undisciplined imagination.

Alfred North Whitehead
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.

Alfred North Whitehead
When he [God] said Let there be light, then there was light and not a mere imitation or statistical average.

Alfred North Whitehead
Governments are best classified by considering who are the "somebodies" they are in fact endeavoring to satisfy.

Alfred North Whitehead
To see what is general in what is particular, and what is permanent in what is transitory, is the aim of scientific thought.

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
Science repudiates philosophy. In other words, it has never cared to justify its truth or explain its meaning.

Alfred North Whitehead
Thus, to a really learned man, matter exists in test tubes, animals in cages, art in museums, religion in churches, knowledge in libraries.

Alfred North Whitehead
Accordingly, biology apes the manners of physics. It is orthodox to hold that there is nothing in biology but what is physical mechanism under somewhat complex circumstances.

Alfred North Whitehead
The importance of an individual thinker owes something to chance. For it depends upon the fate of his ideas in the minds of his successors.

Alfred North Whitehead
The way in which the persecution of Galileo has been remembered is a tribute to the quiet commencement of the most intimate change in outlook which the human race had yet encountered. Since a babe was born in a manger, it may be doubted whether so great a thing has happened with so little stir

Alfred North Whitehead
It is natural to think that an abstract science cannot be of much importance in affairs of human life, because it has omitted from its consideration everything of real interest.

Alfred North Whitehead
The reason why we are on a higher imaginative level is not because we have finer imagination, but because we have better instruments.

Alfred North Whitehead
It is impossible to meditate on time and the mystery of nature without an overwhelming emotion at the limitations of human intelligence.

Alfred North Whitehead
Thus we gain from the poets the doctrine that a philosophy of nature must concern itself with at least these five notions: change, value, eternal objects, endurance, organism, interfusion.

Alfred North Whitehead
No part of Mathematics suffers more from the triviality of its initial presentation to beginners than the great subject of series... the general ideas are never disclosed and thus the examples, which exemplify nothing, are reduced to silly trivialities.

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

Alfred North Whitehead
The physical doctrine of the atom has got into a state which is strongly suggestive of the epicycles of astronomy before Copernicus.

Alfred North Whitehead
Logic is the olive branch from the old to the young, the wand which in the hands of youth has the magic property of creating science.

Alfred North Whitehead