Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

300 Sourced Quotes

What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like, and immorality is what they dislike.

Alfred North Whitehead
Systems, scientific and philosophic, come and go. Each method of limited understanding is at length exhausted. In its prime each system is a triumphant success: in its decay it is an obstructive nuisance.

Alfred North Whitehead
In training a child to activity of thought, above all things we must beware of what I will call "inert ideas"—that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilised, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations.
In the history of education, the most striking phenomenon is that schools of learning, which at one epoch are alive with a ferment of genius, in a succeeding generation exhibit merely pedantry and routine. The reason is, that they are overladen with inert ideas. Education with inert ideas is not only useless: it is, above all things, harmful—Corruptio optimi, pessima [the corruption of the best is the worst].

Alfred North Whitehead
The silly question is the first intimation of some totally new development.

Alfred North Whitehead
The great achievements of the past were the adventures of the past. Only the adventurous can understand the greatness of the past.

Alfred North Whitehead
I will not go so far as to say that to construct a history of thought without profound study of the mathematical ideas of successive epochs is like omitting Hamlet from the play which is named after him. That would be claiming too much. But it is certainly analogous to cutting out the part of Ophelia. This simile is singularly exact. For Ophelia is quite essential to the play, she is very charming... and a little mad.

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

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 laws of physics are the decrees of fate.

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
Thus the negative perception is the triumph of consciousness.

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

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

Alfred North Whitehead
Life is the enjoyment of emotion, derived from the past and aimed at the future.

Alfred North Whitehead
In the present-day reconstruction of physics, fragments of the Newtonian concepts are stubbornly retained. The result is to reduce modem physics to a sort of mystic chant over an unintelligible universe.

Alfred North Whitehead
A successful theorist should be excessively interested in immediate events, otherwise he is not at all likely to formulate correctly anything about them.

Alfred North Whitehead
All mathematical calculations about the course of nature must start from some assumed law of nature... Accordingly, however accurately we have calculated that some event must occur, the doubt always remains — Is it true?

Alfred North Whitehead
Time and space express the universe as including the essence of transition and the success of achievement. The transition is real, and the achievement is real. The difficulty is for language to express one of them without explaining away the other.

Alfred North Whitehead