Alfred North Whitehead Quotes
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Rationalism is an adventure in the clarification of thought.
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Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.
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Life is complex in its expression, involving more than percipience, namely desire, emotion, will, and feeling.
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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 ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction.
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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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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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The term many presupposes the term one, and the term one presupposes the term many.
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A culture is in its finest flower before it begins to analyze itself.
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No member of a crew is praised for the rugged individuality of his rowing.
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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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The chief danger to philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence.
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The Function of Reason (1929), Beacon Books, 1958, p. 16
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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.
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The deliberate aim at Peace very easily passes into its bastard substitute, Anesthesia.
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The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment... We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this great science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it.
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Systems, scientific and philosophic, come and go. Each method of limited understanding is at length exhausted. In its prime each system is a triumphant success: in its decay it is an obstructive nuisance.
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A general definition of civilization: a civilized society is exhibiting the five qualities of truth, beauty, adventure, art, peace.
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The rhythm is then the life, in the sense in which it can be said to be included within nature.
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...The modern fading of interest in religion.
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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 English never abolish anything. They put it in cold storage.
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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.