Top 334 Quotes & Sayings by Alfred North Whitehead - Page 2

It belongs to the self-respect of intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final unravelment.

Routine is the god of every social system; it is the seventh heaven of business, the essential component in the success of every factory, the ideal of every statesman. The social machine should run like clockwork.

The vastest knowledge of today cannot transcend the buddhi of the Rishis in ancient India; and science in its most advanced stage now is closer to Vedanta than ever before.

Error is the price we pay for progress.

The aims of scientific thought are to see the general in the particular and the eternal in the transitory.

It is impossible not to feel stirred at the thought of the emotions of man at certain historic moments of adventure and discovery - Columbus when he first saw the Western shore, Pizarro when he stared at the Pacific Ocean, Franklin when the electric spark came from the string of his kite, Galileo when he first turned his telescope to the heavens. Such moments are also granted to students in the abstract regions of thought, and high among them must be placed the morning when Descartes lay in bed and invented the method of co-ordinate geometry.

The worship of God is not a rule of safety - it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable.

Scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study.

The oneness of the universe, and the oneness of each element of the universe, repeat themselves to the crack of doom in the creative advance from creature to creature, each creature including in itself the whole of history and exemplifying the self-identity of things and their mutual diversities.

The future belongs to those who can rise above the confines of the earth.

In a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world

Ninety percent of our lives is governed by emotion. Our brains merely register and act upon what is telegraphed to them by our bodily experience. Intellect is to emotion as our clothes are to our bodies; we could not very well have civilized life without clothes, but we would be in a poor way if we had only clothes without bodies.

In a sense, knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows, for details are swallowed up in principles. The details for knowledge which are important, will be picked up ad hoc in each avocation of life, but the habit of the active utilization of well-understood principles is the final possession of WISDOM.

Great art is more than a transient refreshment. It is something which adds to the permanent richness of the soul's self-attainment. It justifies itself both by its immediate enjoyment, and also by its discipline of the inmost being. Its discipline is not distinct from enjoyment but by reason of it. It transforms the soul into the permanent realization of values extending beyond its former self.

The only justification in the use of force is to reduce the amount of force necessary to be used.

Ninety percent of our lives is governed by emotion.

Religion is the reaction of human nature to its search for God.

Symbolism is no mere idle fancy or corrupt degeneration: it is inherent in the very texture of human life.

How the past perishes is how the future becomes.

It is a safe rule to apply that, when a mathematical or philosophical author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense.

After you understand about the sun and the stars and the rotation of the earth, you may still miss the radiance of the sunset.

Everyone is a philosopher. Not everyone is good at it.

The real history does not get written, because it is not in people's brains but in their nerves and vitals.

There are no whole truths: All truths are half-truths.

It is not paradox to say that in our most theoretical moods we may be nearest to our most practical applications.

The difference between ancients and moderns is that the ancients asked what have we experienced, and moderns asked what can we experience.

The foundation of reverence is this perception, that the present holds within itself the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, that whole amplitude of time, which is eternity.

Science repudiates philosophy. In other words, it has never cared to justify its truth or explain its meaning.

Each human being is a more complex structure than any social system to which he belongs.

Some of the finest moral intuitions come to quite humble people. The visiting of lofty ideas doesn't depend on formal schooling.

Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them.

I consider Christianity to be one of the great disasters of the human race... It would be impossible to imagine anything more un - Christianlike than theology.

The mentality of mankind and the language of mankind created each other. If we like to assume the rise of language as a given fact, then it is not going too far to say that the souls of men are the gift from language to mankind. The account of the sixth day should be written: He gave them speech, and they became souls.

Nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent, the nightingale for its song; and the sun for its radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves and should turn them into odes of self congratulation on the excellence of the human mind.

The essence of Christianity is the appeal to the life of Christ as a revelation of the nature of God and of God's agency in the world. The record is fragmentary, inconsistent, and uncertain. . . . But there can be no doubt as to what elements in the record have evoked a response from all that is best in human nature. The Mother, the Child, and the bare manger: the lowly man, homeless and self-forgetful, with his message of peace, love, and sympathy: the suffering, the agony, the tender words as life ebbed, the final despair: and the whole with the authority of supreme victory.

It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

The foundations of the world are to be found, not in the cognitive experience of conscious thought, but in the aesthetic experience of everyday life.

People make the mistake of talking about 'natural laws.' There are no natural laws. There are only temporary habits of nature.

From the very beginning of his education, the child should experience the joy of discovery.

Dogmatism is the anti-Christ of learning.

You think the world is what it looks like in fine weather at noon day; I think it is what it seems like in the early morning when one first wakes from deep sleep.

Vedanta is the most impressive metaphysics the human mind has conceived.

The purpose of education is not to fill a vessel but to kindle a flame.

What we perceive as the present is the vivid fringe of memory tinged with anticipation.

No science can be more secure than the unconscious metaphysics which tacitly it presupposes.

In all education the main cause of failure is staleness.

The ultimate metaphysical ground is the creative advance into novelty.

It is the business of future to be dangerous.... The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur.

Aristotle discovered all the half-truths which were necessary to the creation of science.

Fertilization of the soul is the reason for the necessity of art.

Nobody has a right to speak more clearly than he thinks.

God is in the world, or nowhere, creating continually in us and around us. Insofar as man partakes of this creative process does he partake of the divine, of God, and that participation is his immortality.

The point about zero is that we do not need to use it in the operation of daily life. No one goes out to buy zero fish.

Great people plant trees they'll never sit under.

Learning preserves the errors of the past as well as its wisdom.

I consider Christian theology to be one of the great disasters of the human race.

There is only one subject matter for education, and that is Life in all its manifestations

It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.

The world is shocked, or amused, by the sight of saintly old people hindering in the name of morality the removal of obvious brutalities from a legal system.

No reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the ground of rationality.