Quotes By Alfred North Whitehead

It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious.

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.

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.

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.

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.