Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

It is the business of the future to be dangerous.

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

The real history does not get written, because it is not in people's brains but in their nerves and vitals.

I consider Christianity to be one of the great disasters of the human race... It would be impossible to imagine anything more un - Christianlike than theology.

Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure.

It is not paradox to say that in our most theoretical moods we may be nearest to our most practical applications.

Scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study.

In all education the main cause of failure is staleness.

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

Learning preserves the errors of the past as well as its wisdom.

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

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

Intolerance is the besetting sin of moral fervour.

The power of Christianity lies in its revelation in act, of that which Plato divined in theory.

It is the business of the future to be dangerous; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties.

An open mind is all very well in its way, but it ought not to be so open that there is no keeping anything in or out of it.

No Roman ever died in contemplation over a geometrical diagram.

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.

In every age of well-marked transition, there is the pattern of habitual dumb practice and emotion which is passing and there is oncoming a new complex of habit.

Speak out in acts; the time for words has passed, and only deeds will suffice.

But harmony is limitation. Thus rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality. Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing.

The English never abolish anything. They put it in cold storage.

There is no nature at an instant.

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

Knowledge is always accompanied with accessories of emotion and purpose.

Without adventure civilization is in full decay. ... The great fact [is] that in their day the great achievements of the past were the adventures of the past.

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.

Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure, a sense of nothing having been done before, of complete freedom to experiment.

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

Vigorous societies harbour a certain extravagance of objectives.

The merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth.

Each human being is a more complex structure than any social system to which he belongs.

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

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.

No science can be more secure than the unconscious metaphysics which tacitly it presupposes.

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

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

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

You cannot evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music, and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves.

The paradox is now fully established that the utmost abstractions are the true weapons with which to control our thought of concrete fact.

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

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.

There is no nature in an instant.

Vigorous societies harbor a certain extravagance of objectives, so that men wander beyond the safe provision of personal gratifications.

Rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality.

Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilisation of knowledge.

Religion is what a man does with his solitariness.

The worship of God is not a rule of safety - it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable.

The future belongs to those who can rise above the confines of the earth.

There is no more common error than to assume that, because prolonged and accurate mathematical calculations have been made, the application of the result to some fact of nature is absolutely certain.