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Alfred North Whitehead Quotes | Quotes said by Alfred North Whitehead

  • Alfred North Whitehead Quote #1

    All of Western philosophy is but a footnote to Plato.


  • Alfred North Whitehead Quote #2

    Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

  • Alfred North Whitehead Quote #3

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

  • Alfred North Whitehead Quote #4

    Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.

  • Alfred North Whitehead Quote #5

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

  • Alfred North Whitehead Quote #6

    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 Quote #7

    In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory.

  • Alfred North Whitehead Quote #8

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

  • Alfred North Whitehead Quote #9

    Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct form ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.

  • Alfred North Whitehead Quote #10

    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 Quote #11

    It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious.

  • Alfred North Whitehead Quote #12

    Knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows.

  • Alfred North Whitehead Quote #13

    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 involve unhappiness. For it is by them that the futility of escape can be made evident in the drama. This remorseless inevitableness is what pervades scientific thought. The laws of physics are the decrees of fate.

  • Alfred North Whitehead Quote #14

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

  • Alfred North Whitehead Quote #15

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

  • Alfred North Whitehead Quote #16

    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 Quote #17

    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 Quote #18

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

  • Alfred North Whitehead Quote #19

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

  • Alfred North Whitehead Quote #20

    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 eighteenth-century Age of Reason in its contention that religion is nothing but an organized, gigantic fraud and a curse to the human race, nothing could be farther from the truth. It possesses these two aspects, the evil one of the two appealing to people capable of naïve hatred; but what is actually happening is that when you get natures stirred to their depths over questions which they feel to be overwhelmingly vital, you get the bad stirred up in them as well as the good; the mud as well as the water. It doesn't seem to matter much which sect you have, for both types occur in all sects....

  • Alfred North Whitehead Quote #21

    Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.

  • Alfred North Whitehead Quote #22

    Religion is what an individual does with his solitariness.

  • Alfred North Whitehead Quote #23

    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 Quote #24

    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 should be, 'Seek simplicity and distrust it.

  • Alfred North Whitehead Quote #25

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

  • Alfred North Whitehead Quote #26

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

  • Alfred North Whitehead Quote #27

    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 Quote #28

    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 Quote #29

    The merit of Locke'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 Quote #30

    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.

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