It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Literature
Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Religion
“Necessity is the mother of invention” is a silly proverb. “Necessity is the mother of futile dodges” is much closer to the truth. The basis of growth of modern invention is science, and science is almost wholly the outgrowth of pleasurable intellectual curiosity.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Curiosity, Necessity
It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Intelligence
The vigour of civilised societies is preserved by the widespread sense that high aims are worth while. Vigorous societies harbour a certain extravagance of objectives, so that men wander beyond the safe provision of personal gratifications. All strong interests easily become impersonal, the love of a good job well done. There is a sense of harmony about such an accomplishment, the Peace brought by something worth while. Such personal gratification arises from aim beyond personality.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Civilization
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
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, Order, Change
It is the first step in sociological wisdom, to recognize that the major advances in civilisation are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur: like unto an arrow in the hand of a child. The art of free society consists first in the maintenance of the symbolic code; and secondly in fearlessness of revision, to secure that the code serves those purposes which satisfy an enlightened reason. Those societies which cannot combine reverence to their symbols with freedom of revision, must ultimately decay either from anarchy, or from the slow atrophy of a life stifled by useless shadows.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Society
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
How the past perishes is how the future becomes.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Past, Reflection
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
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
Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Action
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: Common Sense, Familiarity, Science
Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Ideas
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
Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Adventure
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: Reflection, Regret, Past, The Present
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
A civilized society is one that exhibits the five qualities of truth, beauty, adventure, art and peace.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Civilization
In all education the main cause of failure is staleness
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Failure
Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Quotations
Inventive genius requires pleasurable mental activity as a condition for its vigorous exercise
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Genius
Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Life and Living
Seek simplicity but distrust it.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Simplicity
It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Truth
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.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Habits, Habit
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: Adventure, Action
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
Human nature loses its most precious quality when it is robbed of its sense of things beyond, unexplored and yet insistent.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Topics: Humanity
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 German Mathematician
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