Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, 'Seek simplicity and distrust it.

~ Alfred North Whitehead

Religion carries two sorts of people in two entirely opposite directions: the mild and gentle people it carries towards mercy and justice; the persecuting people it carries into fiendish sadistic cruelty. Mind you, though this may seem to justify the eighteenth-century Age of Reason in its contention that religion is nothing but an organized, gigantic fraud and a curse to the human race, nothing could be farther from the truth. It possesses these two aspects, the evil one of the two appealing to people capable of naïve hatred; but what is actually happening is that when you get natures stirred to their depths over questions which they feel to be overwhelmingly vital, you get the bad stirred up in them as well as the good; the mud as well as the water. It doesn't seem to matter much which sect you have, for both types occur in all sects....

~ Alfred North Whitehead

In the conditions of modern life the rule is absolute, the race which does not value trained intelligence is doomed.

~ Alfred North Whitehead

Get your knowledge quickly and then use it. If you can use it you will retain it.

~ Alfred North Whitehead

The solution which I am urging is to eradicate the fatal disconnection of subjects which kills the vitality of our modern curriculum. There is only one subject-matter for education, and that is LIfe in all its manifestations. Instead of this single unity, we offer children--Algebra, from which nothing follows; Geometry, from which nothing follows; Science, from which nothing follows; History, from which nothing follows; a Couple of Languages, never mastered; and lastly, most dreary of all, Literature, represented by plays of Shakespeare, with philological notes and short analyses of plot and character to be in substance committed to memory. Can such a list be said to represent Life, as it is known in the midst of living it? The best that can be said of it is, that it is a rapid table of contents which a deity might run over in his mind while he was thinking of creating a world, and has not yet determined how to put it together

~ Alfred North Whitehead

The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment... We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this great science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it.

~ Alfred North Whitehead

Science is a river with two sources, the practical source and the theoretical source.

~ Alfred North Whitehead

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

~ Alfred North Whitehead

Rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality.Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing. The limitation, and the basis arising from what is already actual, are both of them necessary and interconnected.

~ Alfred North Whitehead

Let me here remind you that the essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things. This inevitableness of destiny can only be illustrated in terms of human life by incidents which in fact involve unhappiness. For it is by them that the futility of escape can be made evident in the drama. This remorseless inevitableness is what pervades scientific thought. The laws of physics are the decrees of fate.

~ Alfred North Whitehead

[Beware of] the fallacy of misplaced concreteness [mistaking an abstraction for concrete reality, for actuality] In the inescapable flux, there is something that abides; in the overwhelming permanence, there is an element that escapes into flux. Permanence can be snatched only out of flux; and the passing moment can find its adequate intensity only by its submission to permanence.Error is the price we pay for progress.In the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. The importance of truth is that it adds to interest.Creativity is the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact. It is that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively. It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity.The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, Seek simplicity and distrust it.It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.[From various of Whitehead's books, not only PR]

~ Alfred North Whitehead

It is the business of the future to be dangerous, and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties.

~ Alfred North Whitehead

Religion is what an individual does with his solitariness.

~ Alfred North Whitehead

We think in generalities, but we live in detail. To make the past live, we must perceive it in detail in addition to thinking of it in generalities.

~ Alfred North Whitehead

Life is complex in its expression, involving more than percipience, namely desire, emotion, will, and feeling.

~ Alfred North Whitehead

The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things.

~ Alfred North Whitehead

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

~ Alfred North Whitehead

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

~ Alfred North Whitehead

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

~ Alfred North Whitehead

The factor in human life provocative of a noble discontent is the gradual emergence of a sense of criticism founded upon appreciation of beauty and of intellectual distinction and of duty.

~ Alfred North Whitehead

The total absence of humour from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.

~ Alfred North Whitehead

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.

~ Alfred North Whitehead

A science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost.

~ Alfred North Whitehead

Vigorous societies harbour a certain extravagance of objectives.

~ Alfred North Whitehead

A man really writes for an audience of about ten persons. Of course if others like it that is clear gain. But if those ten are satisfied he is content.

~ Alfred North Whitehead

The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.

~ Alfred North Whitehead

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

~ Alfred North Whitehead

Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.

~ Alfred North Whitehead

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

~ Alfred North Whitehead

It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious.

~ Alfred North Whitehead

Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.

~ Alfred North Whitehead

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.

~ Alfred North Whitehead

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

~ Alfred North Whitehead

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.

~ Alfred North Whitehead

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.

~ Alfred North Whitehead

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

~ Alfred North Whitehead

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

~ Alfred North Whitehead

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

~ Alfred North Whitehead

Knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows.

~ Alfred North Whitehead

Wisdom alone is true ambition's aim, wisdom is the source of virtue and of fame; obtained with labour, for mankind employed, and then, when most you share it, best enjoyed.

~ Alfred North Whitehead