Alfred North Whitehead Quotes
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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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A race preserves its vigour so long as it harbours a real contrast between what has been and what may be, and so long as it is nerved by the vigour to adventure beyond the safeties of the past. Without adventure, civilization is in full decay.
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The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order.
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Every human being is the natural guardian of his own importance.
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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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Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.
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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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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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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 deliberate aim at Peace very easily passes into its bastard substitute, Anesthesia.
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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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No member of a crew is praised for the rugged individuality of his rowing.
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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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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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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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Life is complex in its expression, involving more than percipience, namely desire, emotion, will, and feeling.
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The Function of Reason (1929), Beacon Books, 1958, p. 16
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The chief error in philosophy is overstatement.
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The term many presupposes the term one, and the term one presupposes the term many.
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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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...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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A precise language awaits a completed metaphysics.
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A culture is in its finest flower before it begins to analyze itself.