Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
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
All practical teachers know that education is a patient process of mastery of details, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day.

Alfred North Whitehead
Search for measurable elements among your phenomena, and then search for relations between these measures of physical quantities.

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

Alfred North Whitehead
Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions.

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
No more impressive warning can be given to those who would confine knowledge and research to what is apparently useful, than the reflection that conic sections were studied for eighteen hundred years merely as an abstract science, without regard to any utility other than to satisfy the craving for knowledge.

Alfred North Whitehead
If you have had your attention directed to the novelties in thought in your own lifetime, you will have observed that almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced, and almost any idea which jogs you out of your current abstractions may be better than nothing.

Alfred North Whitehead
The only justification in the use of force is to reduce the amount of force necessary to be used.

Alfred North Whitehead
There is always more chance of hitting upon something valuable when you aren't too sure what you want to hit upon.

Alfred North Whitehead
The idea that physicists would in future have to study the theory of tensors created real panic amongst them following the first announcement that Einstein's predictions had been verified.

Alfred North Whitehead
The criticism of knowledge is the criticism of the past.

Alfred North Whitehead