Top 280 Alfred North Whitehead Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “Philosophy is the product of wonder. The effort after the general characterization of the world around us is the romance of human thought.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

252. “The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

253. “It is natural to think that an abstract science cannot be of much importance in affairs of human life, because it has omitted from its consideration everything of real interest.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

254. “The English never abolish anything. They put it in cold storage.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

255. “There is a quality of life which lies always beyond the mere fact of life; and when we include the quality in the fact, there is still omitted the quality of the quality.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

256. “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

257. “The theme of Cosmology, which is the basis of all religions, is the story of the dynamic effort of the World passing into everlasting unity, and of the static majesty of God’s vision, accomplishing its purpose of completion by absorption of the World’s multiplicity of effort.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

258. “The certainty of mathematics depends on its complete abstract generality.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

259. “The physical doctrine of the atom has got into a state which is strongly suggestive of the epicycles of astronomy before Copernicus .”

— Alfred North Whitehead

260. “In every age of well-marked transition, there is the pattern of habitual dumb practice and emotion which is passing and there is oncoming a new complex of habit.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

261. “Spoken language is merely a series of squeaks.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

262. “I am also greatly indebted to Bergson, William James, and John Dewey. One of my preoccupations has been to rescue their type of thought from the charge of anti-intellectualism, which rightly or wrongly has been associated with it.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

263. “We must not expect simple answers to far-reaching questions. However far our gaze penetrates, there are always heights beyond which block our vision.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

264. “Every organism requires an environment of friends, partly to shield it from violent changes, and partly to supply it with its wants.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

265. “Value is coextensive with reality.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

266. “The difference between ancients and moderns is that the ancients asked what have we experienced, and moderns asked what can we experience.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

267. “As society is now constituted, a literal adherence to the moral precepts scattered throughout the Gospels would mean sudden death.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

268. “Mathematics as a science, commenced when first someone, probably a Greek, proved propositions about “any” things or about “some” things, without specifications of definite particular things.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

269. “The vigor of civilized societies is preserved by the widespread sense that high aims are worth-while.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

270. “I regret that it has been necessary for me in this lecture to administer a large dose of four-dimensional geometry. I do not apologize, because I am really not responsible for the fact that nature in its most fundamental aspect is four-dimensional. Things are what they are.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

271. “Whenever a text-book is written of real educational worth, you may be quite certain that some reviewer will say that it will be difficult to teach from it. Of course it will be difficult to teach from it. It it were easy, the book ought to be burned.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

272. “Our habitual experience is a complex of failure and success in the enterprise of interpretation. If we desire a record of uninterpreted experience, we must ask a stone to record its autobiography.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

273. “Let me here remind you that the essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things. This inevitableness of destiny can only be illustrated in terms of human life by incidents which in fact involve unhappiness. For it is by them that the futility of escape can be made evident in the drama. This remorseless inevitableness is what pervades scientific thought. The laws of physics are the decrees of fate.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

274. “The chief error in philosophy is overstatement.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

275. “A duration is a concrete slab of nature limited by simultaneity which is an essential factor disclosed in sense-awareness.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

276. “The learned tradition is not concerned with truth, but with the learned adjustment of learned statements of antecedent learned people.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

277. “Systems, scientific or philosophic, come and go. Each method of limited understanding is at length exhausted. In its prime each system is a triumphant success: in its decay it is an obstructive nuisance.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

278. “Science is a river with two sources, the practical source and the theoretical source.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

279. “The degeneracy of mankind is distinguished from its uprise by the dominance of chill abstractions, divorced from aesthetic content.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

280. “The consequences of a plethora of half-digested theoretical knowledge are deplorable.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

281. “You cannot evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music, and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

282. “Vigorous societies harbor a certain extravagance of objectives, so that men wander beyond the safe provision of personal gratifications.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

283. “An open mind is all very well in its way, but it ought not to be so open that there is no keeping anything in or out of it.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

284. “The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment... We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, this great science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

285. “Some of the finest moral intuitions come to quite humble people. The visiting of lofty ideas doesn’t depend on formal schooling.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

286. “The point about zero is that we do not need to use it in the operation of daily life. No one goes out to buy zero fish.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

287. “Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

288. “Science only deals with half the evidence provided by human experience. It divides the seamless coat – or, to change the metaphor into a happier form, it examines the coat, which is superficial, and neglects the body which is fundamental.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

289. “We must produce a great age, or see the collapse of the upward striving of our race.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

290. “Russell is a Platonic dialogue in himself.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

291. “It is the ideal of speculative philosophy that its fundamental notions shall not seem capable of abstraction from each other. In other words, it is presupposed that no entity can be conceived in complete abstraction from the system of the universe, and that it is the business of speculative philosophy to exhibit this truth. This character is its coherence.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

292. “Only the adventurous can understand the greatness of the past. In its day, the literature of the past was an adventure. Aischylus, Sophocles, Euripides were adventurers in the world of thought. To read their plays without any sense of new ways of understanding the world and of savouring its emotions is to miss the vividness which constitutes their whole value. But adventures are to the adventurous. Thus a passive knowledge of the past loses the whole value of its message.”

— Alfred North Whitehead