Alfred North Whitehead Quotes
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.
A man of science doesn't discover in order to know, he wants to know in order to discover.
Style, in its finest sense, is the last acquirement of the educated mind; it is also the most useful. It pervades the whole being.
To see what is general in what is particular, and what is permanent in what is transitory, is the aim of scientific thought.
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.
That knowledge which adds greatness to character is knowledge so handled as to transform every phase of immediate experience.
Life is the enjoyment of emotion, derived from the past and aimed at the future.
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.
In this modern world, the celibacy of the medieval learned class has been replaced by a celibacy of the intellect which is divorced from the concrete contemplation of the complete facts.
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.
We think in generalities, but we live in detail. To make the past live, we must perceive it in detail in addition to thinking of it in generalities.
Not a sentence or a word is independent of the circumstances under which it is uttered.
I have always noticed that deeply and truly religious persons are fond of a joke, and I am suspicious of those who aren't.
The aims of scientific thought are to see the general in the particular and the eternal in the transitory.
The difference between ancients and moderns is that the ancients asked what have we experienced, and moderns asked what can we experience.
No reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the ground of rationality.
Some of the finest moral intuitions come to quite humble people. The visiting of lofty ideas doesn't depend on formal schooling.
The foundations of the world are to be found, not in the cognitive experience of conscious thought, but in the aesthetic experience of everyday life.
Aristotle discovered all the half-truths which were necessary to the creation of science.
The world is shocked, or amused, by the sight of saintly old people hindering in the name of morality the removal of obvious brutalities from a legal system.
Science repudiates philosophy. In other words, it has never cared to justify its truth or explain its meaning.
...the only simplicity to be trusted is the simplicity to be found on the far side of complexity.
A great society is a society in which its men of business think greatly of their functions.
We must not expect simple answers to far-reaching questions. However far our gaze penetrates, there are always heights beyond which block our vision.
The whole of mathematics consists in the organization of a series of aids to the imagination in the process of reasoning.
Peace is self-control at its widest-at the width where the "self" has been lost, and interest has been transferred to coordinations wider than personality.
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.
The learned tradition is not concerned with truth, but with the learned adjustment of learned statements of antecedent learned people.
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.
It is impossible to meditate on time and the mystery of nature without an overwhelming emotion at the limitations of human intelligence.
Religion increasingly is tending to degenerate into a decent formula wherewith to embellish a comfortable life.
Without adventure all civilization is full of decay. Adventure rarely reaches its predetermined end. Columbus never reached China.
No religion can be considered in abstraction from its followers, or even from its various types of followers.
There is no greater hindrance to the progress of thought than an attitude of irritated party-spirit.
The fixed person for the fixed duties who in older societies was such a godsend, in future will be a public danger.
Each generation criticizes the unconscious assumptions made by its parent. It may assent to them, but it brings them out in the open.
As society is now constituted, a literal adherence to the moral precepts scattered throughout the Gospels would mean sudden death.
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.
The importance of an individual thinker owes something to chance. For it depends upon the fate of his ideas in the minds of his successors.
Governments are best classified by considering who are the 'somebodies' they are in fact endeavouring to satisfy.
Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity.
