Top 334 Quotes & Sayings by Alfred North Whitehead - Page 4

Every epoch has its character determined by the way its population reacts to the material events which they encounter.

Each generation criticizes the unconscious assumptions made by its parent. It may assent to them, but it brings them out in the open.

Spoken language is merely a series of squeaks.

There is no greater hindrance to the progress of thought than an attitude of irritated party-spirit.

Without adventure all civilization is full of decay. Adventure rarely reaches its predetermined end. Columbus never reached China.

In a living civilization there is always an element of unrest, for sensitiveness to ideas means curiosity, adventure, change. Civilized order survives on its merits and is transformed by its power of recognizing its imperfections.

Governments are best classified by considering who are the 'somebodies' they are in fact endeavouring to satisfy.

Philosophy asks the simple question: What is it all about?

Knowledge keeps no better than fish.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience.

An open mind is all very well in its way, but it ought not to be so open that there is no keeping anything in or out of it.

Apart from blunt truth, our lives sink decadently amid the perfume of hints and suggestions.

To see what is general in what is particular, and what is permanent in what is transitory, is the aim of scientific thought.

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.

No religion can be considered in abstraction from its followers, or even from its various types of followers.

Whenever a text-book is written of real educational worth, you may be quite certain that some reviewer will say that it will be difficult to teach from it. Of course it will be difficult to teach from it. It it were easy, the book ought to be burned.

I am sure that one secret of a successful teacher is that he has formulated quite clearly in his mind what the pupil has got to know in precise fashion. He will then cease from half-hearted attempts to worry his pupils with memorizing a lot of irrelevant stuff of inferior importance.

Learning preserves the errors of the past, as well as its wisdom. For this reason, dictionaries are public dangers, although they are necessities.

Democracy...is a society in which the unbeliever feels undisturbed and at home. If there were only a half dozen unbelievers in America, their well-being would be a test of our democracy.

Do not teach too many subjects and what you teach, teach thoroughly.

I always feel that I have two duties to perform with a parting guest: one, to see that he doesn't forget anything that is his; the other, to see that he doesn't take anything that is mine.

Not a sentence or a word is independent of the circumstances under which it is uttered.

A man of science doesn't discover in order to know, he wants to know in order to discover.

Religion increasingly is tending to degenerate into a decent formula wherewith to embellish a comfortable life.

Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity.

The importance of an individual thinker owes something to chance. For it depends upon the fate of his ideas in the minds of his successors.

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.

Many a scientist has patiently designed experiments for the purpose of substantiating his belief that animal operations are motivated by no purposes. He has perhaps spent his spare time in writing articles to prove that human beings are as other animals so that 'purpose' is a category irrelevant for the explanation of their bodily activities, his own activities included. Scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study.

The worth of men consists in their liability to persuasion. They can persuade and can be persuaded by the disclosure of alternatives, the better and the worse. Civilization 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 civilization, either in the general society or in a remnant of individuals. Thus in a live civilization there is always an element of unrest.

The fixed person for the fixed duties who in older societies was such a godsend, in future will be a public danger.

You cannot evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music, and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves.

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.

Style, in its finest sense, is the last acquirement of the educated mind; it is also the most useful. It pervades the whole being.

I regret that it has been necessary for me in this lecture to administer a large dose of four-dimensional geometry. I do not apologize, because I am really not responsible for the fact that nature in its most fundamental aspect is four-dimensional. Things are what they are.

War can protect; it cannot create.

In order to acquire learning, we must first shake ourselves free of it.

In the conditions of modern life the rule is absolute, the race which does not value trained intelligence is doomed. Not all your heroism, not all your social charm, not all your wit, not all your victories on land or at sea, can move back the finger of fate. To-day we maintain ourselves. To-morrow science will have moved forward yet one more step, and there will be no appeal from the judgment which will then be pronounced on the uneducated.

You cannot be wise without some basis of knowledge, but you may easily acquire knowledge and remain bare of wisdom.

By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and in effect increases the mental power of the race.

The new tinge to modern minds is a vehement and passionate interest in the relation of general principles to irreducible and stubborn facts. All the world over and at all times there have been practical men, absorbed in 'irreducible and stubborn facts'; all the world over and at all times there have been men of philosophic temperament, who have been absorbed in the weaving of general principles. It is this union of passionate interest in the detailed facts with equal devotion to abstract generalisation which forms the novelty of our present society.

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.

The learned tradition is not concerned with truth, but with the learned adjustment of learned statements of antecedent learned people.

In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as it were a mist, cloaking the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions.

It is impossible to meditate on time and the mystery of nature without an overwhelming emotion at the limitations of human intelligence.

I am also greatly indebted to Bergson, William James, and John Dewey. One of my preoccupations has been to rescue their type of thought from the charge of anti-intellectualism, which rightly or wrongly has been associated with it.

The pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit.

In a sense, knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows: for details are swallowed up in principles.

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.

The fact of the religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience.

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are cavalry charges in a battle - they are limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.

...the self-satisfied dogmatism with which mankind at each period of its history cherishes the delusion of the finality of existing modes of knowledge.

As society is now constituted, a literal adherence to the moral precepts scattered throughout the Gospels would mean sudden death.

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.

Without deductive logic science would be entirely useless. It is merely a barren game to ascend from the particular to the general, unless afterwards we can reverse the process and descend from the general to the particular, ascending and descending like angels on Jacob's ladder.

A science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost.

No Roman ever died in contemplation over a geometrical diagram.

Heaven knows what seeming nonsense may not tomorrow be demonstrated truth.

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.

"One and one make two" assumes that the changes in the shift of circumstance are unimportant. But it is impossible for us to analyze this notion of unimportant change.

The paradox is now fully established that the utmost abstractions are the true weapons with which to control our thought of concrete fact.