Alfred North Whitehead - Life Quotes

33 Sourced Quotes

View all Alfred North Whitehead Quotes
Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.

Alfred North Whitehead
The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, "Seek simplicity and distrust it."

Alfred North Whitehead
We have to remember that while nature is complex with timeless subtlety, human thought issues from the simple-mindedness of beings whose active life is less than half a century.

Alfred North Whitehead
The factor in human life provocative of a noble discontent is the gradual emergence of a sense of criticism, founded upon appreciation of beauty, and of intellectual distinction, and of duty.

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

Alfred North Whitehead
One main factor in the upward trend of animal life has been the power of wandering.

Alfred North Whitehead
Symbolism is no mere idle fancy or corrupt degeneration: it is inherent in the very texture of human life.

Alfred North Whitehead
The fact of the religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience.

Alfred North Whitehead
Ninety percent of our lives is governed by emotion. Our brains merely register and act upon what is telegraphed to them by our bodily experience. Intellect is to emotion as our clothes are to our bodies; we could not very well have civilized life without clothes, but we would be in a poor way if we had only clothes without bodies.

Alfred North Whitehead
It is the first step in sociological wisdom, to recognize that the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur:—like unto an arrow in the hand of a child. The art of free society consists first in the maintenance of the symbolic code; and secondly in fearlessness of revision, to secure that the code serves those purposes which satisfy an enlightened reason. Those societies which cannot combine reverence to their symbols with freedom of revision, must ultimately decay either from anarchy, or from the slow atrophy of a life stifled by useless shadows.

Alfred North Whitehead
The symbolic elements in life have a tendency to run wild, like the vegetation in a tropical forest … A continuous process of pruning, and of adaptation to a future ever requiring new forms of expression, is a necessary function in every society.

Alfred North Whitehead
The human body is an instrument for the production of art in the life of the human soul.

Alfred North Whitehead
It is natural to think that an abstract science cannot be of much importance in affairs of human life, because it has omitted from its consideration everything of real interest.

Alfred North Whitehead
Uneducated clever women, who have seen much of the world, are in middle life so much the most cultured part of the community. They have been saved from this horrible burden of inert ideas.

Alfred North Whitehead
The rhythm is then the life, in the sense in which it can be said to be included within nature.

Alfred North Whitehead
The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.

Alfred North Whitehead
Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.

Alfred North Whitehead
In the past human life was lived in a bullock cart; in the future it will be lived in an aeroplane; and the change of speed amounts to a difference in quality.

Alfred North Whitehead
Philosophy finds religion, and modifies it; and conversely religion is among the data of experience which philosophy must weave into its own scheme. Religion is an ultimate craving to infuse into the insistent particularity of emotion that non-temporal generality which primarily belongs to conceptual thought alone. In the higher organisms the differences of tempo between the mere emotions and the conceptual experiences produce a life-tedium, unless this supreme fusion has been effected. The two sides of the organism require a reconciliation in which emotional experiences illustrate a conceptual justification, and conceptual experiences find an emotional illustration.

Alfred North Whitehead
There is only one subject matter for education, and that is Life in all its manifestations

Alfred North Whitehead
In its solitariness the spirit asks, What, in the way of value, is the attainment of life? And it can find no such value till it has merged its individual claim with that of the objective universe. Religion is world-loyalty.

Alfred North Whitehead
Whether or no it be for the general good, life is robbery. It is at this point that with life morals become acute. The robber requires justification.

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
Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of human life is to grasp as much as we can out of the infinitude.

Alfred North Whitehead
Identification of rhythm as the casual counterpart of life; wherever there is some life, only perceptible to us when the analogies are sufficiently close.

Alfred North Whitehead
We find here the final application of the doctrine of objective immortality. Throughout the perishing occasions in the life of each temporal Creature, the inward source of distaste or of refreshment, the judge arising out of the very nature of things, redeemer or goddess of mischief, is the transformation of Itself, everlasting in the Being of God. In this way, the insistent craving is justified — the insistent craving that zest for existence be refreshed by the ever-present, unfading importance of our immediate actions, which perish and yet live for evermore.

Alfred North Whitehead
Life is complex in its expression, involving more than percipience, namely desire, emotion, will, and feeling.

Alfred North Whitehead