Alfred North Whitehead quotes

Alfred North Whitehead was a British mathematician and philosopher, recognized for his work in logic and process philosophy. His collaboration with Bertrand Russell on "Principia Mathematica" laid the foundations for modern logic. He later developed process philosophy, greatly influencing metaphysics, theology, and education. Here are 199 of his quotes:

Simple solutions seldom are. It takes a very unusual mind to undertake analysis of the obvious.

Alfred North Whitehead

The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.

Alfred North Whitehead

No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it.

Alfred North Whitehead

There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays to the devil.

Alfred North Whitehead

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.

Alfred North Whitehead

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.

Alfred North Whitehead

Seek simplicity, then distrust.

Alfred North Whitehead

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

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

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

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

Alfred North Whitehead

Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.

Alfred North Whitehead

What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like and immorality is what they dislike.

Alfred North Whitehead

In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory.

Alfred North Whitehead

Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct form ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.

Alfred North Whitehead

We think in generalities, but we live in detail.

Alfred North Whitehead

It is a safe rule to apply that, when a mathematical or philosophical author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense.

Alfred North Whitehead

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 greatest science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it.

Alfred North Whitehead

The science of pure mathematics ... may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit.

Alfred North Whitehead

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

Alfred North Whitehead

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

Alfred North Whitehead

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