Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Alfred North Whitehead (English Mathematician, Philosopher)

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) was an English mathematician, Idealist philosopher, and metaphysician. A pioneer in mathematical logic, he demonstrated that all mathematics could be derived from a few logical axioms. He also produced a wide-ranging philosophical system in accord with modern science.

Born the son of a clergyman in Ramsgate, Isle of Thanet, Kent, Whitehead was educated at Trinity College-Cambridge, where he was a senior lecturer in mathematics until 1911. He became a professor of applied mathematics at London’s Imperial College 1914–24, and professor of philosophy at Harvard 1924–37.

Extending the Boolean symbolic logic in the inventive Treatise on Universal Algebra (1898,) Whitehead contributed the essay “Mathematical Concepts of the Material World” (1905) to the Royal Society.

Influenced by the Italian mathematician Giuseppe Peano, Whitehead worked together with Bertrand A. Russell, a prior pupil at Trinity, in the Principia Mathematica (3 vols., 1910–13,) the most significant single contribution to logic since Aristotle.

At Harvard, Whitehead developed a far-reaching metaphysical theory. In his Edinburgh Gilford Lectures, “Process and Reality” (1929,) he explained a metaphysics embracing both psychological and physical experiences, with life-events as the decisive elements of reality.

Whitehead’s other notable works include Adventures of Ideas (1933,) Modes of Thought (1938,) and Essays in Science and Philosophy (1947.)

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Alfred North Whitehead

The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, Seek simplicity and distrust it.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Simplicity

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
Topics: Truth, Morality

Wisdom alone is true ambition’s aim, wisdom is the source of virtue and of fame; obtained with labour, for mankind employed, and then, when most you share it, best enjoyed.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Ambition

Common sense is genius in homespun.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Common Sense, Genius

Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Religion

We think in generalities, but we live in detail.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Mindsets, Thought, Positive Attitudes, Thinking, One Step at a Time, Optimism, Thoughts

Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Life and Living

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

A race preserves its vigor so long as it harbors a real contrast between what has been and what may be; and so long as it is nerved by the vigor to adventure beyond the safeties of the past. Without adventure civilization is in full decay.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Action, Adventure

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: Confidence, Civilization

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. It should be capable of shutting its doors sometimes, or it may be found a little draughty.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Mind

Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Philosophy, Philosophers

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

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

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

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Thoughts, Thought, Thinking

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
Topics: Destiny

No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Ideals

It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Literature

Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Quotations

It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Truth

Ideas won’t keep; something must be done about them.
—Alfred North Whitehead

Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Conversation, Speech

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order. Life refuses to be embalmed alive. The more prolonged the halt in some unrelieved system of order, the greater the crash of the dead society.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Progress, Change, Order

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.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: The Present, Regret, Past, Reflection

Inventive genius requires pleasurable mental activity as a condition for its vigorous exercise.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Genius

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
Topics: Ideas

Philosophy is the product of wonder.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Philosophers, Philosophy

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

Familiar things happen, and mankind does not bother about them. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Science, Common Sense, Familiarity

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