Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

300 Sourced Quotes

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
The things which are temporal arise by their participation in the things which are eternal.

Alfred North Whitehead
But in the prevalent discussion of classes, there are illegitimate transitions to the notions of a 'nexus' and of a 'proposition'. The appeal to a class to perform the services of a proper entity is exactly analogous to an appeal to an imaginary terrier to kill a real rat.
Process and Reality

Alfred North Whitehead
You cannot evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music, and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves.

Alfred North Whitehead
It is no paradox to say that in our most theoretical moods we may be nearest to our most practical applications.

Alfred North Whitehead
It [philosophy] builds cathedrals before the workmen have moved a stone, and it destroys them before the elements have worn down their arches.

Alfred North Whitehead
Adventure is essential, namely, the search for new perfection.

Alfred North Whitehead
There is an old epigram which assigns the empire of the sea to the English, of the land to the French, and of the clouds to the Germans. Surely it was from the clouds that the Germans fetched + and - ; the ideas which these symbols have generated are much too important to the welfare of humanity to have come from the sea or from the land.

Alfred North Whitehead
It must be admitted that there is a degree of instability which is inconsistent with civilization. But, on the whole, the great ages have been unstable ages.

Alfred North Whitehead
Experiment is nothing else than a mode of cooking the facts for the sake of exemplifying the law.

Alfred North Whitehead
God is in the world, or nowhere, creating continually in us and around us. Insofar as man partakes of this creative process does he partake of the divine, of God, and that participation is his immortality....

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

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
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 only justification in the use of force is to reduce the amount of force necessary to be used.

Alfred North Whitehead