Alfred North Whitehead Quotes
-
The worst that happened to men of science was that Galileo suffered an honorable detention and a mild reproof, before dying peacefully in his bed.
-
The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.
-
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.
-
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.
-
More and more it is becoming evident that what the West can most readily give to the East is its science and its scientific outlook. This is transferable from country to country, and from race to race, wherever there is a rational society.
-
The mentality of mankind and the language of mankind created each other. If we like to assume the rise of language as a given fact, then it is not going too far to say that the souls of men are the gift from language to mankind. The account of the sixth day should be written: He gave them speech, and they became souls.
-
Intolerance is the besetting sin of moral fervour.
-
Ninety percent of our lives is governed by emotion. Our brains merely register and act upon what is telegraphed to them by our bodily experience. Intellect is to emotion as our clothes are to our bodies; we could not very well have civilized life without clothes, but we would be in a poor way if we had only clothes without bodies.
-
The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order.
-
The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.
-
There remains the final reflection, how shallow, puny, and imperfect are efforts to sound the depths in the nature of things. In philosophical discussion, the merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement is an exhibition of folly.
-
The fact of the religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience.
-
Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science. Its principles may be eternal, but the expression of those principles requires continual development.
-
I have always noticed that deeply and truly religious persons are fond of a joke, and I am suspicious of those who aren’t.
-
The science of pure mathematics, in its modern developments, may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit.
-
We do not require elaborate training merely in order to refrain from embarking upon intricate trains of inference. Such abstinence is only too easy.
-
Our habitual experience is a complex of failure and success in the enterprise of interpretation. If we desire a record of uninterpreted experience, we must ask a stone to record its autobiography.
-
Every human being is the natural guardian of his own importance.
-
Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilisation of knowledge.
-
Life is complex in its expression, involving more than percipience, namely desire, emotion, will, and feeling.
-
Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of human life is to grasp as much as we can out of the infinitude.
-
For the kingdom of heaven is with us today.
-
Some philosophers fail to distinguish propositions from judgments; … But in the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. The importance of truth is that it adds to interest.
-
Scientists, animated by the purpose of proving they are purposeless, constitute an interesting subject for study.