Every really new idea looks crazy at first.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Thought, Thoughts, Thinking
How the past perishes is how the future becomes.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Reflection, Past
We cannot think first and act afterward. From the moment of birth we are immersed in action, and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Action
Philosophy is the product of wonder.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Philosophers, Philosophy
Ideas won’t keep; something must be done about them.
—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
We think in generalities, but we live in detail.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Thought, Positive Attitudes, Thoughts, Optimism, One Step at a Time, Thinking, Mindsets
The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Youth
The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, Seek simplicity and distrust it
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Simplicity
There are two principles inherent in the very nature of things, recurring in some particular embodiments whatever field we explore – the spirit of change, and the spirit of conservation. There can be nothing real without both. Mere change without conservation is a passage from nothing to nothing… . Mere conservation without change cannot conserve. For after all, there is a flux of circumstance, and the freshness of being evaporates under mere repetition.
—Alfred North Whitehead
It is the business of the future to be dangerous…. The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Risk, Future, Danger
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.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Civilization, Confidence
Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Intelligence, Intellectuals
An enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Experience
Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Religion
The worth of men consists in their liability to persuasion… . Civilisation is the maintenance of social order, by its own inherent persuasiveness as embodying the nobler alternative. The recourse to force, however unavoidable, is a disclosure of the failure of civilisation, either in the general society or in a remnant of individuals. Thus in a live civilisation there is always an element of unrest. For sensitiveness to ideas means curiosity, adventure, change. Civilised order survives on its merits, and is transformed by its power of Recognizing its imperfections.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Civilization
It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Truth
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
Topics: Nature
If a dog jumps in your lap, it is because he is fond of you; but if a cat does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Dogs
Every organism requires an environment of friends, partly to shield it from violent changes, and partly to supply it with its wants.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Friendship
Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Speech, Conversation
In all education the main cause of failure is staleness.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Failure
Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Ignorance
Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Quotations
The task of a university is the creation of the future, so far as rational thought and civilized modes of appreciation can affect the issue.
—Alfred North Whitehead
I have always noticed that deeply and truly religious persons are fond of a joke, and I am suspicious of those who aren’t
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Religion
Some of the finest moral intuitions come to quite humble people. The visiting of lofty ideas doesn’t depend on formal schooling. Think of those Galilean peasants.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Instincts
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
Topics: Teachers
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
Topics: Quotations
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- John Herschel English Mathematician
- Bertrand A. Russell British Philosopher, Mathematician
- Charles Sanders Peirce American Philosopher
- Isaac Newton English Physicist
- Blaise Pascal French Philosopher, Scientist
- Freeman Dyson American Physicist, Author
- Francis Bacon English Philosopher
- Arthur Eddington English Astronomer
- Charles Proteus Steinmetz German-born American Mathematician
- E. F. Schumacher British Economist
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