Famous Alfred North Whitehead Quotations

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"Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern."
by Alfred North Whitehead
"We think in generalities, but we live in detail."
by Alfred North Whitehead
"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."
by Alfred North Whitehead
"But you can catch yourself entertaining habitually certain ideas and setting others aside; and that, I think, is where our personal destinies are largely decided."
by Alfred North Whitehead
"An enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words."
by Alfred North Whitehead
"A clash of doctrines is not a disaster--it is an opportunity."
by Alfred North Whitehead
"Almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced."
by Alfred North Whitehead
"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them."
by Alfred North Whitehead
"Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it."
by Alfred North Whitehead
"I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning , or destroyed it altogether."
by 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. . . 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."
by Alfred North Whitehead
"If a dog jumps in your lap, it is because he is fond of you; but if a cat does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer."
by Alfred North Whitehead
"If a dog jumps in your lap, it is because he is fond of you but if a cat does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer."
by Alfred North Whitehead
"Ideas won't keep something must be done about them."
by Alfred North Whitehead
"Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended."
by Alfred North Whitehead
"It does not matter what men say in words, so long as their activities are controlled by settled instincts. The words may ultimately destroy the instincts. But until this has occurred, words do not count. - from Science and the Modern World"
by Alfred North Whitehead
"It takes a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious."
by Alfred North Whitehead
"It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious."
by Alfred North Whitehead
"Let us grant that the pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit, a refuge from the goading urgency of contingent happenings."
by 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."
by Alfred North Whitehead
"Periods of tranquility are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up."
by Alfred North Whitehead
"Religion is what a person does in his solitariness."
by Alfred North Whitehead
"Seek simplicity, and distrust it."
by Alfred North Whitehead
"Spoken language is merely a series of squeaks."
by Alfred North Whitehead
"The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order."
by Alfred North Whitehead
"The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy."
by Alfred North Whitehead
"The future belongs to those who can rise above the confines of the earth."
by Alfred North Whitehead
"The only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present. The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground; for it is the past, and it is the future."
by Alfred North Whitehead
"The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them."
by Alfred North Whitehead
"There are no whole truths; all truths are half- truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil."
by Alfred North Whitehead
"There are no whole truths all truths are half- truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil."
by Alfred North Whitehead
"Through and through the world is infested with quantity. To talk sense is to talk quantities, It is no use saying the nation is large- how large? It is no use s aying that radium is scarce- how scarce? You can not evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves."
by Alfred North Whitehead
"We cannot think first and act afterward. From the moment of birth we are immersed in action, and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought."
by Alfred North Whitehead
"You cannot be wise without some basis of knowledge, but you may easily acquire knowledge and remain bare of wisdom."
by Alfred North Whitehead
"Familiar things happen, and mankind does not bother about them. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious."
by Alfred North Whitehead
"True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes. Rather the firm resolve of virtue and reason."
by Alfred North Whitehead
"The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order. Life refuses to be embalmed alive. The more prolonged the halt in some unrelieved system of order, the greater the crash of the dead society."
by Alfred North Whitehead
"Common sense is genius in homespun."
by Alfred North Whitehead
"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."
by Alfred North Whitehead
"Seek simplicity but distrust it."
by Alfred North Whitehead
"It is the first step in sociological wisdom, to recognize that the major advances in civilisation 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."
by Alfred North Whitehead
"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking."
by Alfred North Whitehead


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