Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

Seek simplicity and distrust it.

The theme of Cosmology, which is the basis of all religions, is the story of the dynamic effort of the World passing into everlasting unity, and of the static majesty of God's vision, accomplishing its purpose of completion by absorption of the World's multiplicity of effort.

It builds cathedrals before the workmen have moved a stone, and it destroys them before the elements have worn down their arches. It is the architect of the buildings of the spirit, and it is also their solvent: - and the spiritual precedes the material.

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.

Ideas won't keep; something must be done about them.

Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them.

The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature throughout the centuries is the notion of 'independent existence.' There is no such mode of existence; every entity is to be understood in terms of the way it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.

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.

Great dreamers' dreams are never fulfilled, they are always transcended.

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

The new tinge to modern minds is a vehement and passionate interest in the relation of general principles to irreducible and stubborn facts. All the world over and at all times there have been practical men, absorbed in 'irreducible and stubborn facts'; all the world over and at all times there have been men of philosophic temperament, who have been absorbed in the weaving of general principles. It is this union of passionate interest in the detailed facts with equal devotion to abstract generalisation which forms the novelty of our present society.

In the theory of well-ordered series and compact series, we have followed Cantor closely, except in dealing with Zermelo's theorem (*257 — 8), and in cases where Cantor's work tacitly assumes the multiplicative axiom. Thus what novelty there is, is in the main negative. In particular, the multiplicative axiom is required in all known proofs of the fundamental proposition that the limit of a progression of ordinals of the second class {i.e. applicable to series whose fields have ^{o terms) is an ordinal of the second class (cf *265). In consequence of this fact, a very large part of the recognized theory of transfinite ordinals must be considered doubtful.

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.

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato

Philosophers can never hope finally to formulate these metaphysical first principles. Weakness of insight and deficiencies of language stand in the way inexorably. Words and phrases must be stretched towards a generality foreign to their ordinary usage; and however such elements of language be stabilized as technicalities, they remain metaphors mutely appealing for an imaginative leap.