Quotes By Alfred North Whitehead

When you're average, you're just as close to the bottom as you are the top.

Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure.

It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression.

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.

Knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows.

Man can acquire accomplishments or he can become an animal, whichever he wants. God makes the animals, man makes himself.

The task of a university is the creation of the future, so far as rational thought and civilized modes of appreciation can affect the issue.

Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language.

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.

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

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

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.