Top 280 Alfred North Whitehead Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of life is to grasp as much as we can out of that infinitude.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

102. “One main factor in the upward trend of animal life has been the power of wandering.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

103. “The chief danger to philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

104. “As soon as high consciousness is reached, the enjoyment of existence is entwined with pain, frustration, loss, tragedy. Amid the passing of so much beauty, so much heroism, so much daring, Peace is then the intuition of permanence. It keeps vivid the sensitiveness to the tragedy; and it sees the fineness beyond the faded level of surrounding fact. Each tragedy is the disclosure of an ideal: What might have been, and was not; What can be. The tragedy was not in vain.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

105. “Peace is self-control at its widest-at the width where the “self” has been lost, and interest has been transferred to coordinations wider than personality.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

106. “Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

107. “Knowledge is always accompanied with accessories of emotion and purpose.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

109. “The motive of success is not enough.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

110. “In all education the main cause of failure is staleness.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

111. “Order is not sufficient. What is required, is something much more complex. It is order entering upon novelty; so that the massiveness of order does not degenerate into mere repetition; and so that the novelty is always reflected upon a background of system.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

113. “The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, ‘Seek simplicity and distrust it.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

114. “The great achievements of the past were the adventures of the past. Only the adventurous can understand the greatness of the past.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

116. “Our rate of progress is such that an individual human being, of ordinary length of life, will be called on to face novel situations which find no parallel in his past. The fixed person, for the fixed duties, who, in older societies was such a godsend, in the future will be a public danger.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

117. “It must be admitted that there is a degree of instability which is inconsistent with civilization. But, on the whole, the great ages have been unstable ages.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

118. “The result of teaching small parts of a large number of subjects is the passive reception of disconnected ideas, not illumed with any spark of vitality.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

119. “Governments are best classified by considering who are the “somebodies” they are in fact endeavoring to satisfy.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

120. “God is the unlimited conceptual realization of the absolute wealth of potentiality.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

121. “Life is the enjoyment of emotion, derived from the past and aimed at the future.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

122. “Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

123. “From the moment of birth we are immersed in action, and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

124. “That knowledge which adds greatness to character is knowledge so handled as to transform every phase of immediate experience.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

125. “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.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

126. “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.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

127. “Wisdom is the fruit of a balanced development.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

128. “Education should turn out the pupil with something he knows well and something he can do well.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

129. “Problems are only opportunities in disquise.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

131. “When success turns a man’s head he faces failure.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

132. “Get your knowledge quickly and then use it. If you can use it you will retain it.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

133. “In so far as your metaphysical beliefs are implicit, you vaguely interpret the past on the lines of the present. But when it comes to the primary metaphysical data, the world of which you are immediately conscious is the whole datum.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

134. “In this sense, God is the great companion – the fellow-sufferer who understands.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

136. “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.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

137. “The justification for a university is that it preserves the connection between knowledge and the zest of life, by uniting the young and the old in the imaginative consideration of learning.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

139. “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.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

140. “Life is complex in its expression, involving more than percipience, namely desire, emotion, will, and feeling.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

141. “A clash of doctrine is not a disaster, it is an opportunity.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

142. “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.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

146. “Learning is often spoken of as if we are watching the open pages of all the books which we have ever read, and then, when occasion arises, we select the right page to read aloud to the universe.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

148. “The task of a university is the creation of the future, so far as rational thought and civilized modes of appreciation can affect the issue.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

149. “Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness. Thus religion is solitariness; and if you are never solitary, you are never religious.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

150. “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.”

— Alfred North Whitehead