Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

"The future belongs to those who can rise above the confines of the earth."
-Alfred North Whitehead

"Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance is the death of knowledge."
-Alfred North Whitehead in Ignorance quotes.

"We think in generalities, but we live in detail."
-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 in Solidarity quotes.

"I will not go so far as to say that to construct a history of thought without profound study of the mathematical ideas of successive epochs is like omitting Hamlet from the play which is named after him. . . But it is certainly analogous to cutting out the part of Ophelia. This simile is singularly exact. For Ophelia is quite essential to the play, she is very charming-- and a little mad."
-Alfred North Whitehead

"An enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words."
-Alfred North Whitehead

"The art of progress is to preserve order amid change."
-Alfred North Whitehead

"Wisdom alone is true ambition's aim Wisdom the source of virtue, and of fame, Obtained with labor, for mankind employed, And then, when most you share it, best enjoyed."
-Alfred North Whitehead

"Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of life is to grasp as much as we can out of that infinitude."
-Alfred North Whitehead in Life quotes.

"The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them."
-Alfred North Whitehead in Ideas quotes.

"It takes a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious."
-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

"What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like, and immorality is what they dislike."
-Alfred North Whitehead

"Religion is the last refuge of human savagery."
-Alfred North Whitehead in Religion quotes.

"The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order."
-Alfred North Whitehead

"Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern."
-Alfred North Whitehead in Art quotes.

"If a dog jumps in 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 in Dogs quotes.

"Nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent, the nightingale for its song; and the sun for its radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves and should turn them into odes of self congratulation on the excellence of the human mind."
-Alfred North Whitehead

"Fools act on imagination without knowledge, pedants act on knowledge without imagination."
-Alfred North Whitehead

"Actors are loved because they are unoriginal. Actors stick to their script. The unoriginal man is loved by the mediocrity because this kind of "artistic" expression is something to which the merest five-eighth can climb."
-Alfred North Whitehead in Actors quotes.

"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 in Quotations quotes.

"Seek simplicity, and distrust it."
-Alfred North Whitehead in Simplicity quotes.

"Let us grant that the pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit, a refuge from the goading urgency of contingent happenings."
-Alfred North Whitehead

"The only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present. The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground; for it is the past, and it is the future."
-Alfred North Whitehead

"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them."
-Alfred North Whitehead

"Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it. A merely well informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth."
-Alfred North Whitehead

"The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy."
-Alfred North Whitehead in Age quotes.