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. (Alfred North Whitehead)
Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains. (Alfred North Whitehead)
It requires a very unusual mind to make an analysis of the obvious. (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. (Alfred North Whitehead)
On the ostensible exactitude of certain branches of human knowledge, including mathematics The exactness is a fake. (Alfred North Whitehead)
Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self. (Alfred North Whitehead)
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. (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)
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. (Alfred North Whitehead)
Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern. (Alfred North Whitehead)
The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature. (Alfred North Whitehead)
The merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth. (Alfred North Whitehead)
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. (Alfred North Whitehead)
Apart from blunt truth, our lives sink decadently amid the perfume of hints and suggestions. (Alfred North Whitehead)
The science of pure mathematics ... may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit. (Alfred North Whitehead)