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

Alfred North Whitehead

When you're average, you're just as close to the bottom as you are the top.

Alfred North Whitehead

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

Alfred North Whitehead

It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

Alfred North Whitehead

It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression.

Alfred North Whitehead

Almost all new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.

Alfred North Whitehead

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

Alfred North Whitehead

I would be a billionaire if I was looking to be a selfish boss. That's not me.

Alfred North Whitehead

We think in generalities, but we live in detail.

Alfred North Whitehead

Common sense is genius in homespun.

Alfred North Whitehead

Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning.

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

Without adventure civilization is in full decay.

Alfred North Whitehead

But you can catch yourself entertaining habitually certain ideas and setting others aside; and that, I think, is where our personal destinies are largely decided.

Alfred North Whitehead

The absolute pacifist is a bad citizen; times come when force must be used to uphold right, justice and ideals.

Alfred North Whitehead

Philosophy is the product of wonder.

Alfred North Whitehead

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

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

Ideas won't keep; something must be done about them.

Alfred North Whitehead

Civilizations can only be understood by those who are civilized.

Alfred North Whitehead

The silly question is the first intimation of some totally new development.

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