Alfred North Whitehead quotes - page 3

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:

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

A culture is in its finest flower before it begins to analyze itself.

Alfred North Whitehead

The human body is an instrument for the production of art in the life of the human soul.

Alfred North Whitehead

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

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

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

Alfred North Whitehead

We think in generalities, but we live in detail. To make the past live, we must perceive it in detail in addition to thinking of it in generalities.

Alfred North Whitehead

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

That knowledge which adds greatness to character is knowledge so handled as to transform every phase of immediate experience.

Alfred North Whitehead

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

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

Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind and within the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realized; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest.

Alfred North Whitehead

Scientists, animated by the purpose of proving they are purposeless, constitute an interesting subject for study.

Alfred North Whitehead

Systems, scientific and 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

...The pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit...

Alfred North Whitehead

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

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

The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them.

Alfred North Whitehead

The relevant poems are Milton's Paradise Lost, Pope's Essay on Man, Wordsworth's Excursion, Tennyson's In Memoriam.

Alfred North Whitehead

The power of God is the worship He inspires.... The worship of God is not a rule of safety - it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable. The death of religion comes with the repression of the high hope of adventure.

Alfred North Whitehead

Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas.

Alfred North Whitehead

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

Alfred North Whitehead