Top 334 Quotes & Sayings by Alfred North Whitehead - Page 6

Rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality.

Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it. A merely well informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth.

You may not divide the seamless coat of learning.

Mathematics, in its widest significance, is the development of all types of formal, necessary, deductive reasoning.

Error itself may be happy chance.

Vigorous societies harbour a certain extravagance of objectives.

The worst that happened to men of science was that Galileo suffered an honorable detention and a mild reproof, before dying peacefully in his bed.

Now in creative thought common sense is a bad master. Its sole criterion for judgement is that the new ideas shall look like the old ones. In other words it can only work by suppressing originality.

Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilisation of knowledge.

The way in which the persecution of Galileo has been remembered is a tribute to the quiet commencement of the most intimate change in outlook which the human race had yet encountered. Since a babe was born in a manger, it may be doubted whether so great a thing has happened with so little stir

Some philosophers fail to distinguish propositions from judgements; ... But in the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. The importance of truth is that it adds to interest.

The race that does not value trained intelligence is doomed.

A Unitarian is a person who believes in at most one God.

Philosophy is the product of wonder. The effort after the general characterization of the world around us is the romance of human thought.

Seek simplicity, then distrust.

Faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology.

The term many presupposes the term one , and the term one presupposes the term many.

The physical doctrine of the atom has got into a state which is strongly suggestive of the epicycles of astronomy before Copernicus .

We must produce a great age, or see the collapse of the upward striving of our race.

When success turns a man's head he faces failure

No man of science wants merely to know. He acquires knowledge to appease his passion for discovery. He does not discover in order to know, he knows in order to discover.

[In many circumstances,] the most important thing about a proposition is not that it be true, but that it be interesting.

I will not go so far as to say that to construct a history of thought without profound study of the mathematical ideas of successive epochs is like omitting Hamlet from the play which is named after him. That would be claiming too much. But it is certainly analogous to cutting out the part of Ophelia. This simile is singularly exact. For Ophelia is quite essential to the play, she is very charming . . . and a little mad.

Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness.

Every intellectual revolution which has ever stirred humanity into greatness has been a passionate protest against inert ideas. Then, alas, with pathetic ignorance of human psychology, it has proceeded by some educational scheme to bind humanity afresh with inert ideas of its own fashioning.

Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure, a sense of nothing having been done before, of complete freedom to experiment.

Without adventure civilization is in full decay. ... The great fact [is] that in their day the great achievements of the past were the adventures of the past.

The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment.

Religion is what a man does with his solitariness.

Mathematics as a science, commenced when first someone, probably a Greek, proved propositions about "any" things or about "some" things, without specifications of definite particular things.

In England if something goes wrong--say, if one finds a skunk in the garden--he writes to the family solicitor, who proceeds to take the proper measures; whereas in America, you telephone the fire department. Each satisfies a characteristic need; in the English, love of order and legalistic procedure; and here in America, what you like is something vivid, and red, and swift.

Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions.

On the ostensible exactitude of certain branches of human knowledge, including mathematics. The exactness is a fake.

Knowledge does not keep any better than fish.