Quotes By Alfred North Whitehead

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

Seek simplicity but distrust it.

Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.

Philosophy is the product of wonder.

The absolute pacifist is a bad citizen; times come when force must be used to uphold right, justice and ideals.

No one who achieves success does so without acknowledging the help of others. The wise and confident acknowledge this help with gratitude.

I have always noticed that deeply and truly religious persons are fond of a joke, and I am suspicious of those who aren't.

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

The silly question is the first intimation of some totally new development.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Civilizations can only be understood by those who are civilized.

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

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

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

Common sense is genius in homespun.

Without adventure civilization is in full decay.

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.