Quotes By Alfred North Whitehead

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious.

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

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

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

We think in generalities, but we live in detail.

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

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

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.

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

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

Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure.

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

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.

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

Knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows.

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

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.

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.