Alfred North Whitehead quotes - page 2

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:

The term many presupposes the term one, and the term one presupposes the term many.

Alfred North Whitehead

No one who achieves success does so without acknowledging the help of others. The wise and confident acknowledge this help with gratitude.

Alfred North Whitehead

Error is the price we pay for progress.

Alfred North Whitehead

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

Alfred North Whitehead

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

Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.

Alfred North Whitehead

The chief error in philosophy is overstatement.

Alfred North Whitehead

Intolerance is the besetting sin of moral fervour.

Alfred North Whitehead

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

Alfred North Whitehead

With the sense of sight, the idea communicates the emotion, whereas, with sound, the emotion communicates the idea, which is more direct and therefore more powerful.

Alfred North Whitehead

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

The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention.

Alfred North Whitehead

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

Alfred North Whitehead

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

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

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

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

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

Alfred North Whitehead

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

What the learned world tends to offer is one second-hand scrap of information illustrating ideas derived from another second-hand scrap of information. The second-handedness of the learned world is the secret of its mediocrity.

Alfred North Whitehead

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

A philosopher of imposing stature doesn't think in a vacuum. Even his most abstract ideas are, to some extent, conditioned by what is or is not known in the time when he lives.

Alfred North Whitehead