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Quotes by Alfred North Whitehead


True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes, but the firm resolve of virtue and reason.
– Alfred North Whitehead
Actors are loved because they are unoriginal. Actors stick to their script. The unoriginal man is loved by the mediocrity because this kind of artistic expression is something to which the merest five-eighth can climb.
– Alfred North Whitehead
An enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words.
– Alfred North Whitehead
Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.
– Alfred North Whitehead
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.
– Alfred North Whitehead
Civilizations can only be understood by those who are civilized.
– Alfred North Whitehead
Common sense is genius in homespun.
– Alfred North Whitehead
Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning.
– Alfred North Whitehead
Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.
– Alfred North Whitehead
I would be a billionaire if I was looking to be a selfish boss. That's not me.
– 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
In every age of well-marked transition, there is the pattern of habitual dumb practice and emotion which is passing and there is oncoming a new complex of habit.
– 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 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
Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.
– Alfred North Whitehead
Man can acquire accomplishments or he can become an animal, whichever he wants. God makes the animals, man makes himself.
– Alfred North Whitehead
Necessity is the mother of invention is a silly proverb. Necessity is the mother of futile dodges is much nearer the truth.
– 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
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
Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.
– Alfred North Whitehead
One main factor in the upward trend of animal life has been the power of wandering.
– Alfred North Whitehead
Periods of tranquility are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.
– Alfred North Whitehead
Philosophy is the product of wonder.
– Alfred North Whitehead
Seek simplicity but distrust it.
– Alfred North Whitehead
Simple solutions seldom are. It takes a very unusual mind to undertake analysis of the obvious.
– Alfred North Whitehead
Speak out in acts; the time for words has passed, and only deeds will suffice.
– Alfred North Whitehead
Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language.
– Alfred North Whitehead
The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervor, live for it, and if need be, die for it.
– Alfred North Whitehead
There is a self-satisfied dogmatism with which mankind at each period of its history cherishes the delusion of the finality of existing modes of knowledge.
– 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
When you're average, you're just as close to the bottom as you are the top.
– Alfred North Whitehead
Without adventure civilization is in full decay.
– Alfred North Whitehead
The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order. Life refuses to be embalmed alive. The more prolonged the halt in some unrelieved system of order, the greater the crash of the dead society.
– Alfred North Whitehead
The worth of men consists in their liability to persuasion. . . . Civilisation is the maintenance of social order, by its own inherent persuasiveness as embodying the nobler alternative. The recourse to force, however unavoidable, is a disclosure of the failure of civilisation, either in the general society or in a remnant of individuals. Thus in a live civilisation there is always an element of unrest. For sensitiveness to ideas means curiosity, adventure, change. Civilised order survives on its merits, and is transformed by its power of Recognizing its imperfections.
– Alfred North Whitehead
The vigour of civilised societies is preserved by the widespread sense that high aims are worth while. Vigorous societies harbour a certain extravagance of objectives, so that men wander beyond the safe provision of personal gratifications. All strong interests easily become impersonal, the love of a good job well done. There is a sense of harmony about such an accomplishment, the Peace brought by something worth while. Such personal gratification arises from aim beyond personality.
– Alfred North Whitehead
There are two principles inherent in the very nature of things, recurring in some particular embodiments whatever field we explore - the spirit of change, and the spirit of conservation. There can be nothing real without both. Mere change without conservation is a passage from nothing to nothing. . . . Mere conservation without change cannot conserve. For after all, there is a flux of circumstance, and the freshness of being evaporates under mere repetition.
– Alfred North Whitehead
Other nations of different habits are not enemies: they are godsends. Men require of their neighbours something sufficiently akin to be understood, something sufficiently different to provoke attention, and something great enough to command admiration. We must not expect, however, all the virtues.
– Alfred North Whitehead
It is the first step in sociological wisdom, to recognize that the major advances in civilisation are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur: like unto an arrow in the hand of a child. The art of free society consists first in the maintenance of the symbolic code; and secondly in fearlessness of revision, to secure that the code serves those purposes which satisfy an enlightened reason. Those societies which cannot combine reverence to their symbols with freedom of revision, must ultimately decay either from anarchy, or from the slow atrophy of a life stifled by useless shadows.
– Alfred North Whitehead
A clash of doctrines is not a disaster--it is an opportunity.
– Alfred North Whitehead
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.
– 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
The future belongs to those who can rise above the confines of the earth.
– Alfred North Whitehead
Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.
– 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
The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.
– Alfred North Whitehead
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.
– Alfred North Whitehead
Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.
– Alfred North Whitehead
Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.
– Alfred North Whitehead
Knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows.
– Alfred North Whitehead
It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious.
– 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
Fools act on imagination without knowledge, pedants act on knowledge without imagination.
– Alfred North Whitehead
Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.
– Alfred North Whitehead