Alfred North Whitehead Quotes
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The deliberate aim at Peace very easily passes into its bastard substitute, Anesthesia.
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Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.
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The chief danger to philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence.
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The main importance of Francis Bacon’s influence does not lie in any peculiar theory of inductive reasoning which he happened to express, but in the revolt against second-hand information of which he was a leader.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The Function of Reason (1929), Beacon Books, 1958, p. 16
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Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.
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The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order.
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...We cannot think first and act afterwards. From the moment of birth we are immersed in action and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought.
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What the learned world tends to offer is one second-hand scrap of information illustrating ideas derived from another second-hand scrap of information. The second-handedness of the learned world is the secret of its mediocrity.
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A precise language awaits a completed metaphysics.
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The consequences of a plethora of half-digested theoretical knowledge are deplorable.
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Life is complex in its expression, involving more than percipience, namely desire, emotion, will, and feeling.
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In its solitariness the spirit asks, What, in the way of value, is the attainment of life? And it can find no such value till it has merged its individual claim with that of the objective universe. Religion is world-loyalty.
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The chief error in philosophy is overstatement.
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Shakespeare wrote better poetry for not knowing too much; Milton, I think, knew too much finally for the good of his poetry.
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In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of a defeat; but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress towards victory.
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A man really writes for an audience of about ten persons. Of course if others like it, that is clear gain. But if those ten are satisfied, he is content.
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Identification of rhythm as the causal counterpart of life; wherever there is some life, only perceptible to us when the analogies are sufficiently close.
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The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervor, live for it, and, if need be, die for it.
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There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.
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...The modern fading of interest in religion.