Top 280 Alfred North Whitehead Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won’t keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervor, live for it, and if need be, die for it.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

152. “Necessity is the mother of invention” is a silly proverb. “Necessity is the mother of futile dodges” is much nearer the truth.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

153. “A man of science doesn’t discover in order to know, he wants to know in order to discover.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

154. “Ideas won’t keep. Something must be done about them.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

157. “No reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the ground of rationality.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

158. “Speak out in acts; the time for words has passed, and only deeds will suffice.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

159. “An unflinching determination to take the whole evidence into account is the only method of preservation against the fluctuating extremes of fashionable opinion.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

160. “Aristotle discovered all the half-truths which were necessary to the creation of science.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

161. “Learning preserves the errors of the past as well as its wisdom.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

162. “Religion is the reaction of human nature to its search for God.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

163. “But harmony is limitation. Thus rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality. Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

164. “The foundations of the world are to be found, not in the cognitive experience of conscious thought, but in the aesthetic experience of everyday life.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

165. “It is not paradox to say that in our most theoretical moods we may be nearest to our most practical applications.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

166. “If a dog jumps into your lap, it is because he is fond of you; but if a cat does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

167. “In modern times the belief that the ultimate explanation of all things was to be found in Newtonian mechanics was an adumbration of the truth that all science, as it grows towards perfection, becomes mathematical in its ideas.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

168. “Common sense is genius in homespun.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

169. “I consider Christian theology to be one of the greatest disasters of the human race.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

170. “The power of Christianity lies in its revelation in act, of that which Plato divined in theory.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

171. “The only justification in the use of force is to reduce the amount of force necessary to be used.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

172. “The main importance of Francis Bacon’s influence does not lie in any peculiar theory of inductive reasoning which he happened to express, but in the revolt against second-hand information of which he was a leader.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

173. “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.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

174. “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.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

175. “Panic of error is the death of progress, and love of truth is its safeguard.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

177. “Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

178. “The race that does not value trained intelligence is doomed.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

180. “Shakespeare wrote better poetry for not knowing too much; Milton, I think, knew too much finally for the good of his poetry.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

181. “Philosophy asks the simple question: What is it all about?”

— Alfred North Whitehead

182. “Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

183. “Knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

185. “It is this union of passionate interest in the detailed facts with equal devotion to abstract generalisation which forms the novelty in our present society .”

— Alfred North Whitehead

186. “Nobody has a right to speak more clearly than he thinks.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

187. “The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

188. “There is no more common error than to assume that, because prolonged and accurate mathematical calculations have been made, the application of the result to some fact of nature is absolutely certain.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

189. “The defense of morals is the battle-cry which best rallies stupidity against change.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

190. “There is a technique, a knack, for thinking, just as there is for doing other things. You are not wholly at the mercy of your thoughts, any more than they are you. They are a machine you can learn to operate.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

191. “There are no whole truths: All truths are half-truths.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

193. “How the past perishes is how the future becomes.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

194. “A student should not be taught more than he can think about.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

195. “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.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

196. “It belongs to the self-respect of intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final unravelment.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

197. “An enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

198. “Human nature loses its most precious quality when it is robbed of its sense of things beyond, unexplored and yet insistent.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

200. “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.”

— Alfred North Whitehead