Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

300 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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
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
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
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
Man, who at times dreamt of himself as a little lower than the angels, has submitted to become the servant and minister of nature.

Alfred North Whitehead
There will be some fundamental assumptions which adherents of all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them. With these assumptions a certain limited number of types of philosophic systems are possible, and this group of systems constitutes the philosophy of the epoch.

Alfred North Whitehead
The electrons seems to be borrowing the character which some people have assigned to the Mahatmas of Tibet.

Alfred North Whitehead
So far as the mere imparting of information is concerned, no university has had any justification for existence since the popularization of printing in the fifteenth century.

Alfred North Whitehead
Thus the negative perception is the triumph of consciousness.

Alfred North Whitehead
An unflinching determination to take the whole evidence into account is the only method of preservation against the fluctuating extremes of fashionable opinion.

Alfred North Whitehead
The laws of physics are the decrees of fate.

Alfred North Whitehead
Science has always suffered from the vice of overstatement. In this way conclusions true within strict limitations have been generalized dogmatically into a fallacious universality.

Alfred North Whitehead
The territory of arithmetic ends where the two ideas of "variables" and of "algebraic form" commence their sway.

Alfred North Whitehead
If science is not to degenerate into a medley of ad hoc hypotheses, it must become philosophical and must enter upon a thorough criticism of its own foundations.

Alfred North Whitehead
Progress in truth — truth of science and truth of religion — is mainly a progress in the framing of concepts, in discarding artificial abstractions or partial metaphors, and in evolving notions which strike more deeply into the root of reality.

Alfred North Whitehead
The whole of mathematics consists in the organization of a series of aids to the imagination in the process of reasoning.

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

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
Nature, even in the act of satisfying anticipation, often provides a surprise.

Alfred North Whitehead
To be an abstraction does not mean that an entity is nothing. It merely means that its existence is only a factor of a more concrete element of nature.

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

Alfred North Whitehead
For mathematics is the science of the most complete abstractions to which the human mind can attain.

Alfred North Whitehead
In every age of well-marked transition, there is the pattern of habitual dumb practice and emotion which is passing and there is oncoming a new complex of habit.

Alfred North Whitehead