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 Cambridge’s Trinity College, 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

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

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