Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

300 Sourced Quotes

Other nations of different habits are not enemies: they are godsends. Men require of their neighbours something sufficiently akin to be understood, something sufficiently different to provoke attention, and something great enough to command admiration. We must not expect, however, all the virtues.

Alfred North Whitehead
Unfortunately in this book of nature the biologists fare badly. Every expression of life takes time. Nothing that is characteristic of life can manifest itself at an instant. Murder is a prerequisite for the absorption of biology into physics as expressed in these traditional concepts.

Alfred North Whitehead
The world is shocked, or amused, by the sight of saintly old people hindering in the name of morality the removal of obvious brutalities from a legal system.

Alfred North Whitehead
Science is in the minds of men, but men sleep and forget, and at their best in any one moment of insight entertain but scanty thoughts. Science therefore is nothing but a confident expectation that relevant thoughts will occasionally occur.

Alfred North Whitehead
There is a tradition of opposition between adherents of induction and of deduction. In my view it would be just as sensible for the two ends of a worm to quarrel.

Alfred North Whitehead
Mathematics is merely an apparatus for analyzing the deductions which can be drawn from any particular premises, supplied by common sense, or by more refined scientific observation, so far as these deductions depend on the forms of the propositions.

Alfred North Whitehead
In mathematics, granted that we are giving any serious attention to mathematical ideas, the symbolism is invariably an immense simplification.

Alfred North Whitehead
Leaving the vast darkness of the subject unobscured.

Alfred North Whitehead
The results of science are never quite true. By a healthy independence of thought perhaps we sometimes avoid adding other people's errors to our own.

Alfred North Whitehead
Science is not discussing the causes of knowledge, but the coherence of knowledge.

Alfred North Whitehead
Every organism requires an environment of friends, partly to shield it from violent changes, and partly to supply it with its wants.

Alfred North Whitehead
Science is even more changeable than theology.

Alfred North Whitehead
In the modern world the celibacy of the medieval learned class has been replaced by a celibacy of the intellectual which is divorced from the concrete contemplation of the complete facts.

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
In order that a mathematical science of any importance may be founded upon conventional definitions, the entities created by them must have properties which bear some affinity to the properties of existing things.

Alfred North Whitehead
Science is either an important statement of systematic theory correlating observations of a common world or is the daydream of a solitary intelligence with a taste for the daydream of publication.

Alfred North Whitehead
We habitually observe by the method of difference. Sometimes we see an elephant, and sometimes we do not. The result is that an elephant, when present, is noticed.

Alfred North Whitehead
Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it. A merely well informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth.

Alfred North Whitehead
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