Top 280 Alfred North Whitehead Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “The purpose of thinking is to let the ideas die instead of us dying.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

3. “Every really new idea looks crazy at first.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

4. “I would be a billionaire if I was looking to be a selfish boss. That’s not me.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

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5. “The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

6. “Seek simplicity, and distrust it.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

7. “The human body is an instrument for the production of art in the life of the human soul.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

8. “When you’re average, you’re just as close to the bottom as you are the top.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

9. “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.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

10. “We think in generalities, but we live in detail.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

11. “Vedanta is the most impressive metaphysics the human mind has conceived.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

12. “The ultimate metaphysical ground is the creative advance into novelty.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

13. “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...”

— Alfred North Whitehead

14. “The worship of God is not a rule of safety – it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

15. “Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

17. “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

18. “Algebra is the intellectual instrument which has been created for rendering clear the quantitative aspects of the world.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

19. “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.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

20. “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

22. “Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

23. “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

24. “Error is the price we pay for progress.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

25. “Imagination is not to be divorced from the facts. It is a way of illuminating the facts.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

26. “The merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God’s earth.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

27. “It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

30. “Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct form ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

31. “The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

32. “Apart from God every activity is merely a passing whiff of insignificance.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

33. “Nature, even in the act of satisfying anticipation, often provides a surprise.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

34. “Almost all new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

35. “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.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

38. “It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

42. “The many become one and are increased by one.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

43. “It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

44. “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

45. “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.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

46. “The only use of knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

47. “Great people plant trees they’ll never sit under.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

48. “Knowledge does not keep any better than fish.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

50. “Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilisation of knowledge.”

— Alfred North Whitehead