Quotes By Alfred North Whitehead

I would be a billionaire if I was looking to be a selfish boss. That's not me.

Fools act on imagination without knowledge, pedants act on knowledge without imagination.

Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of life is to grasp as much as we can out of that infinitude.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays to the devil.

It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.

If a dog jumps into 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.

Almost all new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.

An enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words.

Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.

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.

In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory.

Civilizations can only be understood by those who are civilized.

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.

Common sense is genius in homespun.

Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct form ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.

Without adventure civilization is in full decay.

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.

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.

Simple solutions seldom are. It takes a very unusual mind to undertake analysis of the obvious.

Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning.

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.

Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.

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.

Speak out in acts; the time for words has passed, and only deeds will suffice.

Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas.

The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.

True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes, but the firm resolve of virtue and reason.