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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Rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality. Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing. The limitation, and the basis arising from what is already actual, are both of them necessary and interconnected.

Alfred North Whitehead

My criticism of procedure is that when in his discussion he arrives at a contradiction, he construes it as a crisis in the universe.

Alfred North Whitehead

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

Alfred North Whitehead

Let me here remind you that the essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things. This inevitableness of destiny can only be illustrated in terms of human life by incidents which in fact...

Alfred North Whitehead

In the conditions of modern life the rule is absolute, the race which does not value trained intelligence is doomed.

Alfred North Whitehead

The foundation of reverence is this perception, that the present holds within itself the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, that whole amplitude of time, which is eternity.

Alfred North Whitehead

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

Alfred North Whitehead

The ideas of 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 ...

Alfred North Whitehead

All of Western philosophy is but a footnote to .

Alfred North Whitehead

Religion is what an individual does with his solitariness.

Alfred North Whitehead

The point about zero is that we do not need to use it in the operation of daily life. No one goes out to buy zero fish.

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

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