Quotes By Alfred North Whitehead

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

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

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

Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.

The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, seek simplicity and distrust 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.

We think in generalities, but we live in detail.

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

Ideas won't keep; something must be done about them.

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.

Familiar things happen, and mankind does not bother about them. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

Periods of tranquility are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Seek simplicity but distrust it.

Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.

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

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.

Philosophy is the product of wonder.

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

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