Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

Every epoch has its character determined by the way its population reacts to the material events which they encounter.

War can protect; it cannot create.

In order to acquire learning, we must first shake ourselves free of it.

You cannot be wise without some basis of knowledge, but you may easily acquire knowledge and remain bare of wisdom.

Knowledge keeps no better than fish.

Philosophy asks the simple question: What is it all about?

Heaven knows what seeming nonsense may not tomorrow be demonstrated truth.

In a sense, knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows: for details are swallowed up in principles.

It must be admitted that there is a degree of instability which is inconsistent with civilization. But, on the whole, the great ages have been unstable ages.

Our habitual experience is a complex of failure and success in the enterprise of interpretation. If we desire a record of uninterpreted experience, we must ask a stone to record its autobiography.

"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.

A man really writes for an audience of about ten persons. Of course if others like it, that is clear gain. But if those ten are satisfied, he is content.

Learning preserves the errors of the past, as well as its wisdom. For this reason, dictionaries are public dangers, although they are necessities.

The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanation of complex facts... Seek simplicity and distrust it.

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.

It is natural to think that an abstract science cannot be of much importance in affairs of human life, because it has omitted from its consideration everything of real interest.

A culture is in its finest flower before it begins to analyze itself.

Nature, even in the act of satisfying anticipation, often provides a surprise.

The consequences of a plethora of half-digested theoretical knowledge are deplorable.

Imagination is not to be divorced from the facts. It is a way of illuminating the facts.

The many become one and are increased by one.

Nature is probably quite indifferent to the aesthetic preferences of mathematicians.

The human body is an instrument for the production of art in the life of the human soul.

It is this union of passionate interest in the detailed facts with equal devotion to abstract generalisation which forms the novelty in our present society .

Every organism requires an environment of friends, partly to shield it from violent changes, and partly to supply it with its wants.

The preternatural solemnity of a good many of the professionally religious is to me a point against them.

Disputing the commonsense notion that all events require the prior existence of some underlying matter or substance. There is no antecedent static cabinet.

Shakespeare wrote better poetry for not knowing too much; Milton, I think, knew too much finally for the good of his poetry.

Identification of rhythm as the casual counterpart of life; wherever there is some life, only perceptible to us when the analogies are sufficiently close.

A philosopher of imposing stature doesn't think in a vacuum. Even his most abstract ideas are, to some extent, conditioned by what is or is not known in the time when he lives.

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

An unflinching determination to take the whole evidence into account is the only method of preservation against the fluctuating extremes of fashionable opinion.

The defense of morals is the battle-cry which best rallies stupidity against change.

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

The only use of knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present.

The great achievements of the past were the adventures of the past. Only the adventurous can understand the greatness of the past.

You may not divide the seamless coat of learning.

Philosophy is the product of wonder. The effort after the general characterization of the world around us is the romance of human thought.

The worst that happened to men of science was that Galileo suffered an honorable detention and a mild reproof, before dying peacefully in his bed.

The physical doctrine of the atom has got into a state which is strongly suggestive of the epicycles of astronomy before Copernicus .

Knowledge does not keep any better than fish.

Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness.

Error itself may be happy chance.

The race that does not value trained intelligence is doomed.

Mathematics, in its widest significance, is the development of all types of formal, necessary, deductive reasoning.

We must produce a great age, or see the collapse of the upward striving of our race.

When success turns a man's head he faces failure

Faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology.

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.

Seek simplicity, then distrust.