Alfred North Whitehead Quotes (106 Quotes)



    No one who achieves success does so without acknowledging the help of others. The wise and confident acknowledge this help with gratitude.

    'One and one make two' assumes that the changes in the shift of circumstance are unimportant. But it is impossible for us to analyze this notion of unimportant change.




    The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervor, live for it, and if need be, die for it.

    It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.


    Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.


    Man can acquire accomplishments or he can become an animal, whichever he wants. God makes the animals, man makes himself.

    Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.

    Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct form ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.

    I have always noticed that deeply and truly religious persons are fond of a joke, and I am suspicious of those who aren't.

    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.

    In modern times the belief that the ultimate explanation of all things was to be found in Newtonian mechanics was an adumbration of the truth that all science, as it grows towards perfection, becomes mathematical in its ideas.

    Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.


    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.

    On the ostensible exactitude of certain branches of human knowledge, including mathematics The exactness is a fake.


    Now in creative thought common sense is a bad master. Its sole criterion for judgement is that the new ideas shall look like the old ones. In other words it can only work by suppressing originality.

    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.

    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.

    Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

    The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.


    The essence of Christianity is the appeal to the life of Christ as a revelation of the nature of God and of God's agency in the world. The record is fragmentary, inconsistent, and uncertain.... But there can be no doubt as to what elements in the record have evoked a response from all that is best in human nature. The Mother, the Child, and the bare manger the lowly man, homeless and self-forgetful, with his message of peace, love, and sympathy the suffering, the agony, the tender words as life ebbed, the final despair and the whole with the authority of supreme victory.

    Apart from blunt truth, our lives sink decadently amid the perfume of hints and suggestions.

    The science of pure mathematics ... may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit.

    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.


    Wisdom alone is true ambition's aim, wisdom is the source of virtue and of fame; obtained with labour, for mankind employed, and then, when most you share it, best enjoyed.

    Almost all new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.


    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.

    The progress of Science consists in observing interconnections and in showing with a patient ingenuity that the events of this ever-shifting world are but examples of a few general relations, called laws. To see what is general in what is particular, and what is permanent in what is transitory, is the aim of scientific thought.

    The absolute pacifist is a bad citizen; times come when force must be used to uphold right, justice and ideals.

    The point of mathematics is that in it we have always got rid of the particular instance, and even of any particular sorts of entities. So that for example, no mathematical truths apply merely to fish, or merely to stones, or merely to colours. So long as you are dealing with pure mathematics, you are in the realm of complete and absolute abstraction.... Mathematics is thought moving in the sphere of complete abstraction from any particular instance of what it is talking about.

    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 saying the radium is scarce.... How scarce You cannot evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music, and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves.

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

    Familiar things happen, and mankind does not bother about them. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

    Mathematics as a science, commenced when first someone, probably a Greek, proved propositions about 'any' things or about 'some' things, without specifications of definite particular things.

    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.

    The task of a university is the creation of the future, so far as rational thought and civilized modes of appreciation can affect the issue.

    The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.


    I regret that it has been necessary for me in this lecture to administer a large dose of four-dimensional geometry. I do not apologize, because I am really not responsible for the fact that nature in its most fundamental aspect is four-dimensional. Things are what they are.

    Simple solutions seldom are. It takes a very unusual mind to undertake analysis of the obvious.



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