Top 280 Alfred North Whitehead Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Without doubt, if we are to go back to that ultimate, integral experience, unwarped by the sophistications of theory, that experience whose elucidation is the final aim of philosophy, the flux of things is one ultimate generalization around which we must weave our philosophical system.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

202. “The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature throughout the centuries is the notion of ‘independent existence.’ There is no such mode of existence; every entity is to be understood in terms of the way it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

203. “I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning, or destroyed it altogether.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

204. “This doctrine of necessity in universality means that there is an essence to the universe which forbids relationships beyond itself, as a violation of its rationality. Speculative philosophy seeks that essence.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

205. “Nature is probably quite indifferent to the aesthetic preferences of mathematicians.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

206. “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.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

207. “To be an abstraction does not mean that an entity is nothing. It merely means that its existence is only a factor of a more concrete element of nature.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

208. “To come very near to a true theory, and to grasp its precise application, are two different things, as the history of science teaches us. Everything of importance has been said before by someone who did not discover it.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

209. “The importance of an individual thinker owes something to chance. For it depends upon the fate of his ideas in the minds of his successors.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

210. “Identification of rhythm as the casual counterpart of life; wherever there is some life, only perceptible to us when the analogies are sufficiently close.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

211. “Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

212. “Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science. Its principles may be eternal, but the expression of those principles requires continual development.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

213. “To see what is general in what is particular, and what is permanent in what is transitory, is the aim of scientific thought.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

214. “There is a tradition of opposition between adherents of induction and of deduction. In my view it would be just as sensible for the two ends of a worm to quarrel.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

215. “In this modern world, the celibacy of the medieval learned class has been replaced by a celibacy of the intellect which is divorced from the concrete contemplation of the complete facts.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

216. “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.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

217. “Algebra reverses the relative importance of the factors in ordinary language.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

218. “Education which is not modern share the fate of all organic things which are kept too long.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

219. “Dogmatism is the anti-Christ of learning.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

220. “Routine is the god of every social system; it is the seventh heaven of business, the essential component in the success of every factory, the ideal of every statesman. The social machine should run like clockwork.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

221. “The world is shocked, or amused, by the sight of saintly old people hindering in the name of morality the removal of obvious brutalities from a legal system.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

222. “Intolerance is the besetting sin of moral fervour.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

223. “War can protect; it cannot create.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

225. “Without adventure civilization is in full decay.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

226. “Philosophers can never hope finally to formulate these metaphysical first principles. Weakness of insight and deficiencies of language stand in the way inexorably. Words and phrases must be stretched towards a generality foreign to their ordinary usage; and however such elements of language be stabilized as technicalities, they remain metaphors mutely appealing for an imaginative leap.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

227. “The ideas of Freud were popularized by people who only imperfectly understood them, who were incapable of the great effort required to grasp them in their relationship to larger truths, and who therefore assigned to them a prominence out of all proportion to their true importance.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

228. “The factor in human life provocative of a noble discontent is the gradual emergence of a sense of criticism, founded upon appreciation of beauty, and of intellectual distinction, and of duty.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

229. “The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, seek simplicity and distrust it.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

230. “The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

231. “Wisdom alone is true ambition’s aim, wisdom is the source of virtue and of fame; obtained with labour, for mankind employed, and then, when most you share it, best enjoyed.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

232. “It does not matter what men say in words, so long as their activities are controlled by settled instincts. The words may ultimately destroy the instincts; but until this has occurred, words do not count.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

233. “Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

234. “Disputing the commonsense notion that all events require the prior existence of some underlying matter or substance. There is no antecedent static cabinet.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

235. “Each generation criticizes the unconscious assumptions made by its parent. It may assent to them, but it brings them out in the open.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

236. “Each creative act is the universe incarnating itself as one, and there is nothing above it by way of final condition.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

237. “No Roman ever died in contemplation over a geometrical diagram.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

238. “Error itself may be happy chance.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

239. “The term many presupposes the term one, and the term one presupposes the term many.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

240. “The fixed person for the fixed duties who in older societies was such a godsend, in future will be a public danger.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

241. “A race preserves its vigor so long as it harbors a real contrast between what has been and what may be; and so long as it is nerved by the vigor to adventure beyond the safeties of the past. Without adventure civilization is in full decay.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

242. “The real history does not get written, because it is not in people’s brains but in their nerves and vitals.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

243. “So far as the mere imparting of information is concerned, no university has had any justification for existence since the popularization of printing in the fifteenth century.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

244. “The fact of the religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

245. “I have always noticed that deeply and truly religious persons are fond of a joke, and I am suspicious of those who aren’t.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

246. “The tragedy of the world is that those who are imaginative have but slight experience, and those who are experienced have feeble imaginations.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

247. “In its solitariness the spirit asks, What, in the way of value, is the attainment of life? And it can find no such value till it has merged its individual claim with that of the objective universe. Religion is world-loyalty.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

248. “The aims of scientific thought are to see the general in the particular and the eternal in the transitory.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

249. “But the purpose of philosophy is to rationalize mysticism: not by explaining it away, but by the introduction of novel verbal characterizations, rationally coordinated.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

250. “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