Top 280 Alfred North Whitehead Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Mathematics, in its widest significance, is the development of all types of formal, necessary, deductive reasoning.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

53. “Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

55. “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

56. “A science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

57. “The preternatural solemnity of a good many of the professionally religious is to me a point against them.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

58. “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

59. “True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes, but the firm resolve of virtue and reason.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

60. “Religion is what a man does with his solitariness.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

61. “Fertilization of the soul is the reason for the necessity of art.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

62. “Civilizations can only be understood by those who are civilized.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

63. “Youth is life as yet unblemished by much tragedy, but hardly by TV.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

64. “The antithesis between a technical and a liberal education is fallacious. There can be no adequate technical education which is not liberal, and no liberal education which is not technical.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

66. “The only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present. The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground; for it is the past, and it is the future.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

68. “A culture is in its finest flower before it begins to analyze itself.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

70. “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.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

71. “The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

73. “With the sense of sight, the idea communicates the emotion, whereas, with sound, the emotion communicates the idea, which is more direct and therefore more powerful.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

74. “A general definition of civilization: a civilized society is exhibiting the fine qualities of truth, beauty, adventure, art, peace.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

75. “The whole of mathematics consists in the organization of a series of aids to the imagination in the process of reasoning.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

76. “All practical teachers know that education is a patient process of mastery of details, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

77. “The silly question is the first intimation of some totally new development.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

78. “Philosophy is an attempt to express the infinity of the universe in terms of the limitations of language.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

79. “Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

80. “Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

81. “Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

82. “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.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

83. “Education with inert ideas is not only useless; it is above all things harmful.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

84. “A great society is a society in which its men of business think greatly of their functions.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

86. “What the learned world tends to offer is one second-hand scrap of information illustrating ideas derived from another second-hand scrap of information. The second-handedness of the learned world is the secret of its mediocrity.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

87. “It is the business of the future to be dangerous.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

88. “We think in generalities, but we live in detail. To make the past live, we must perceive it in detail in addition to thinking of it in generalities.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

89. “There is no nature in an instant.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

90. “Inventive genius requires pleasurable mental activity as a condition for its vigorous exercise.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

91. “People make the mistake of talking about ‘natural laws.’ There are no natural laws. There are only temporary habits of nature.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

92. “Change’ is the description of the adventures of eternal objects in the evolving universe of actual things.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

93. “Rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

94. “Ninety percent of our lives is governed by emotion.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

95. “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.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

96. “The science of pure mathematics, in its modern developments, may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

97. “A philosopher of imposing stature doesn’t think in a vacuum. Even his most abstract ideas are, to some extent, conditioned by what is or is not known in the time when he lives.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

98. “It is a false dichotomy to think of Nature and Man. Mankind is a factor in Nature which exhibits in its most intense form the plasticity of Nature.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

100. “Philosophy is the product of wonder.”

— Alfred North Whitehead