Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

300 Sourced Quotes

In the garden of Eden God saw the animals before he named them: in the traditional system [of education] children named the animals before they saw them.

Alfred North Whitehead
Human nature loses its most precious quality when it is robbed of its sense of things beyond, unexplored and yet insistent.

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 Universe is vast. Nothing is more curious than the self-satisfied dogmatism with which mankind at each period of its history cherishes the delusion of the finality of existing modes of knowledge. Skeptics and believers are alike. At this moment scientists and skeptics are the leading dogmatists. Advance in detail is admitted; fundamental novelty is barred. This dogmatic common sense is the death of philosophic adventure.

Alfred North Whitehead
Physics refers to ether, electrons, molecules, intrinsically incapable of direct observation.

Alfred North Whitehead
Philosophy is the product of wonder. The effort after the general characterization of the world around us is the romance of human thought.

Alfred North Whitehead
The preternatural solemnity of a good many of the professionally religious is to me a point against them.

Alfred North Whitehead
There is no more common error than to assume that, because prolonged and accurate mathematical calculations have been made, the application of the result to some fact of nature is absolutely certain.

Alfred North Whitehead
In education, as elsewhere, the broad primrose path leads to a nasty place.

Alfred North Whitehead
Science is a river with two sources, the practical source and the theoretical source. The practical source is the desire to direct our actions to achieve predetermined ends... The theoretical source is the desire to understand.

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

Alfred North Whitehead
For, whereas you can make a replica of an ancient statue, there is no possible replica of an ancient state of mind. There can be no nearer approximation [of one] than that which a masquerade bears to real life.

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
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
Cosmology... restrains the aberrations of the mere undisciplined imagination.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alfred North Whitehead