Quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

About Alfred North Whitehead:

Alfred North Whitehead is best known as the defining figure of the philosophical school known as process philosophy, which today has found application to a wide variety of disciplines, including ecology, theology, education, physics, biology, economics, and psychology, among other areas.
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Religion carries two sorts of people in two entirely opposite directions: the mild and gentle people it carries towards mercy and justice; the persecuting people it carries into fiendish sadistic cruelty. Mind you, though this may seem to justify the...

Alfred North Whitehead

The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher ...

Alfred North Whitehead

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

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

Alfred North Whitehead

Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure.

Alfred North Whitehead

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

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 great science eludes the eff...

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

The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things.

Alfred North Whitehead

The merit of 's 'Essay Concerning Human Understanding' is its adequacy, and not its consistency. . . He should have widened the title of his book into 'An Essay Concerning Experience.

Alfred North Whitehead

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to .

Alfred North Whitehead

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

Alfred North Whitehead

An enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words.

Alfred North Whitehead

True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes, but the firm resolve of virtue and reason.

Alfred North Whitehead

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

Alfred North Whitehead

Fools act on imagination without knowledge, pedants act on knowledge without imagination.

Alfred North Whitehead

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

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

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 task of a university is the creation of the future, so far as rational thought and civilized modes of appreciation can affect the issue.

Alfred North Whitehead

Author Bio

  • NameAlfred North Whitehead
  • DescriptionEnglish mathematician and philosopher
  • BornFebruary 15, 1861
  • DiedDecember 30, 1947
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionPhilosopher; Mathematician; Physicist
  • AwardsFellow Of The Royal Society