Alfred North Whitehead Quotes & Sayings

My criticism of Hegel procedure is that when in his discussion he arrives at a contradiction, he construes it as a crisis in the universe. — Alfred North Whitehead

Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity. — Alfred North Whitehead

Governments are best classified by considering who are the "somebodies" they are in fact endeavoring to satisfy. — Alfred North Whitehead

The aims of scientific thought are to see the general in the particular and the eternal in the transitory. — Alfred North Whitehead

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. — Alfred North Whitehead

Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended. — Alfred North Whitehead

Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within, the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realised; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest. — Alfred North Whitehead

I always feel that I have two duties to perform with a parting guest: one, to see that he doesn't forget anything that is his; the other, to see that he doesn't take anything that is mine. — Alfred North Whitehead

It builds cathedrals before the workmen have moved a stone, and it destroys them before the elements have worn down their arches. It is the architect of the buildings of the spirit, and it is also their solvent: - and the spiritual precedes the material. — Alfred North Whitehead

No Roman ever died in contemplation over a geometrical diagram. — Alfred North Whitehead

It belongs to the self-respect of intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final unravelment. — Alfred North Whitehead

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

No science can be more secure than the unconscious metaphysics which tacitly it presupposes. — Alfred North Whitehead

Rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality.
Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing. The limitation, and the basis arising from what is already actual, are both of them necessary and interconnected. — Alfred North Whitehead

Religion is what a man does with his solitariness. — Alfred North Whitehead

Nature is probably quite indifferent to the aesthetic preferences of mathematicians. — Alfred North Whitehead

Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance is the death of knowledge. — Alfred North Whitehead

We cannot think first and act afterwards. From the moment of birth we are immersed in action and can only guide it by taking thought. — Alfred North Whitehead

Knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows. — Alfred North Whitehead

Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure. — Alfred North Whitehead

Our rate of progress is such that an individual human being, of ordinary length of life, will be called on to face novel situations which find no parallel in his past. The fixed person, for the fixed duties, who, in older societies was such a godsend, in the future will be a public danger. — Alfred North Whitehead

The only use of knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present. — Alfred North Whitehead

The learned tradition is not concerned with truth, but with the learned adjustment of learned statements of antecedent learned people. — Alfred North Whitehead

The fixed person for the fixed duties who in older societies was such a godsend, in future will be a public danger. — Alfred North Whitehead

Do not teach too many subjects and what you teach, teach thoroughly. — Alfred North Whitehead

Each creative act is the universe incarnating itself as one, and there is nothing above it by way of final condition. — Alfred North Whitehead

Routine is the god of every social system; it is the seventh heaven of business, the essential component in the success of every factory, the ideal of every statesman. The social machine should run like clockwork. — 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. — Alfred North Whitehead

All practical teachers know that education is a patient process of mastery of details, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day. — Alfred North Whitehead

People make the mistake of talking about 'natural laws.' There are no natural laws. There are only temporary habits of nature. — Alfred North Whitehead

[In many circumstances,] the most important thing about a proposition is not that it be true, but that it be interesting. — Alfred North Whitehead

The term many presupposes the term one , and the term one presupposes the term many. — Alfred North Whitehead

In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as if it were a mist, cloaking the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reasoning grasps at straws for premises and float on gossamer for deductions. — Alfred North Whitehead

It is the business of future to be dangerous ... The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur. — Alfred North Whitehead

For successful education there must always be a certain freshness in the knowledge dealt with. It must be either new in itself or invested with some novelty of application to the new world of new times. Knowledge does not keep any better than fish. You may be dealing with knowledge of the old species, with some old truth; but somehow it must come to the students, as it were, just drawn out of the sea and with the freshness of its immediate importance. — Alfred North Whitehead

Nobody has a right to speak more clearly than he thinks. — 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. — Alfred North Whitehead

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

The theme of Cosmology, which is the basis of all religions, is the story of the dynamic effort of the World passing into everlasting unity, and of the static majesty of God's vision, accomplishing its purpose of completion by absorption of the World's multiplicity of effort. — Alfred North Whitehead

The art of progress is to reserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order. — Alfred North Whitehead

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

Youth is life as yet unblemished by much tragedy, but hardly by TV. — 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

War can protect; it cannot create. — 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. — 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 life is to grasp as much as we can out of that infinitude. — Alfred North Whitehead

Education which is not modern share the fate of all organic things which are kept too long. — Alfred North Whitehead

Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it. A merely well informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth. — Alfred North Whitehead

True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes, but the firm resolve of virtue and reason. — Alfred North Whitehead

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

A Unitarian is a person who believes in at most one God. — Alfred North Whitehead

After you understand about the sun and the stars and the rotation of the earth, you may still miss the radiance of the sunset. — Alfred North Whitehead

When success turns a man's head he faces failure — Alfred North Whitehead

"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. — Alfred North Whitehead

Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness. Thus religion is solitariness; and if you are never solitary, you are never religious. — Alfred North Whitehead

The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation. — 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. — Alfred North Whitehead

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

Style, in its finest sense, is the last acquirement of the educated mind; it is also the most useful. It pervades the whole being. — Alfred North Whitehead

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

The vigor of civilized societies is preserved by the widespread sense that high aims are worth-while. — Alfred North Whitehead

Democracy ... is a society in which the unbeliever feels undisturbed and at home. If there were only a half dozen unbelievers in America, their well-being would be a test of our democracy. — Alfred North Whitehead

Connectedness is of the essence of all things of all types. It is of the essence of types, that they be connected. Abstraction from connectedness involves the omission of an essential factor in the fact considered. No fact is merely itself. The penetration of literature and art at their height arises from our dumb sense that we have passed beyond mythology; namely, beyond the myth of isolation. — Alfred North Whitehead

Without doubt, if we are to go back to that ultimate, integral experience, unwarped by the sophistications of theory, that experience whose elucidation is the final aim of philosophy, the flux of things is one ultimate generalization around which we must weave our philosophical system. — Alfred North Whitehead

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

By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and in effect increases the mental power of the race. — Alfred North Whitehead

No man of science wants merely to know. He acquires knowledge to appease his passion for discovery. He does not discover in order to know, he knows in order to discover. — Alfred North Whitehead

The tragedy of the world is that those who are imaginative have but slight experience, and those who are experienced have feeble imaginations. — Alfred North Whitehead

The many become one and are increased by one. — Alfred North Whitehead

There is a quality of life which lies always beyond the mere fact of life; and when we include the quality in the fact, there is still omitted the quality of the quality. — Alfred North Whitehead

Some philosophers fail to distinguish propositions from judgements; ... But in the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. The importance of truth is that it adds to interest. — Alfred North Whitehead

The purpose of education is not to fill a vessel but to kindle a flame. — Alfred North Whitehead

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

The vigour of civilised societies is preserved by the widespread sense that high aims are worth while. Vigorous societies harbour a certain extravagance of objectives, so that men wander beyond the safe provision of personal gratifications. All strong interests easily become impersonal, the love of a good job well done. There is a sense of harmony about such an accomplishment, the Peace brought by something worth while. Such personal gratification arises from aim beyond personality. — Alfred North Whitehead

Algebra reverses the relative importance of the factors in ordinary language. It is essentially a written language, and it endeavors to exemplify in its written structures the patterns which it is its purpose to convey. The pattern of the marks on paper is a particular instance of the pattern to be conveyed to thought. The algebraic method is our best approach to the expression of necessity, by reason of its reduction of accident to the ghostlike character of the real variable. — Alfred North Whitehead

When you are criticizing the philosophy of an epoch, do not chiefly direct your attention to those intellectual positions which its exponents feel it necessary explicitly to defend. There will be some fundamental assumptions which adherents to all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them. With these assumptions a certain limited number of types of philosophic systems are possible, and this group of systems constitutes the philosophy of the epoch. — Alfred North Whitehead

Every really new idea looks crazy at first. — Alfred North Whitehead

The justification for a university is that it preserves the connection between knowledge and the zest of life, by uniting the young and the old in the imaginative consideration of learning. — Alfred North Whitehead

Great dreamers' dreams are never fulfilled, they are always transcended. — Alfred North Whitehead

The result of teaching small parts of a large number of subjects is the passive reception of disconnected ideas, not illumed with any spark of vitality. — Alfred North Whitehead

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. — Alfred North Whitehead

We think in generalities, but we live in details. — Alfred North Whitehead

Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science. Its principles may be eternal, but the expression of those principles requires continual development. — Alfred North Whitehead

Change' is the description of the adventures of eternal objects in the evolving universe of actual things. — Alfred North Whitehead

It is presupposed that no entity can be conceived in complete abstraction from the system of the universe, and that it is the business of speculative philosophy to exhibit this truth. This character is its coherence. — Alfred North Whitehead

Without deductive logic science would be entirely useless. It is merely a barren game to ascend from the particular to the general, unless afterwards we can reverse the process and descend from the general to the particular, ascending and descending like angels on Jacob's ladder. — Alfred North Whitehead

The great achievements of the past were the adventures of the past. Only the adventurous can understand the greatness of the past. — Alfred North Whitehead

The silly question is the first intimation of some totally new development. — Alfred North Whitehead

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

From the moment of birth we are immersed in action, and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought. — Alfred North Whitehead

The way in which the persecution of Galileo has been remembered is a tribute to the quiet commencement of the most intimate change in outlook which the human race had yet encountered. Since a babe was born in a manger, it may be doubted whether so great a thing has happened with so little stir — Alfred North Whitehead

A culture is in its finest flower before it begins to analyze itself. — Alfred North Whitehead

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. — Alfred North Whitehead

Every intellectual revolution which has ever stirred humanity into greatness has been a passionate protest against inert ideas. Then, alas, with pathetic ignorance of human psychology, it has proceeded by some educational scheme to bind humanity afresh with inert ideas of its own fashioning. — Alfred North Whitehead

The merit of Locke's 'Essay Concerning Human Understanding' is its adequacy, and not its consistency ... He should have widened the title of his book into 'An Essay Concerning Experience. — Alfred North Whitehead

Let me here remind you that the essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things. This inevitableness of destiny can only be illustrated in terms of human life by incidents which in fact involve unhappiness. For it is by them that the futility of escape can be made evident in the drama. This remorseless inevitableness is what pervades scientific thought. The laws of physics are the decrees of fate. — Alfred North Whitehead

The new tinge to modern minds is a vehement and passionate interest in the relation of general principles to irreducible and stubborn facts. All the world over and at all times there have been practical men, absorbed in 'irreducible and stubborn facts'; all the world over and at all times there have been men of philosophic temperament, who have been absorbed in the weaving of general principles. It is this union of passionate interest in the detailed facts with equal devotion to abstract generalisation which forms the novelty of our present society. — Alfred North Whitehead

Fools act on imagination without knowledge, pedants act on knowledge without imagination. — Alfred North Whitehead