Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.

Rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality.

Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing. The limitation, and the basis arising from what is already actual, are both of them necessary and interconnected.

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.

A duration is a concrete slab of nature limited by simultaneity which is an essential factor disclosed in sense-awareness.

Any physical object which by its influence deteriorates its environment, commits suicide.

Modern science has imposed on humanity the necessity for wandering. Its progressive thought and its progressive technology make the transition through time, from generation to generation, a true migration into uncharted seas of adventure.

Without adventure, civilization is in full decay.

But discontinuity whether in cultures or physics, unavoidably invokes the ancient notion of harmony. And it is out of the extreme discontinuity of modern existence, with its mingling of many cultures and periods, that there is being born today the vision of a rich and complex harmony. We do not have a single, coherent present to live in, and so we need a multiple vision in order to see at all.

Rationalism is an adventure in the clarification of thought.

Without doubt, if we are to go back to that ultimate, integral experience, unwarped by the sophistications of theory, that experience whose elucidation is the final aim of philosophy, the flux of things is one ultimate generalization around which we must weave our philosophical system.

The word “experience” is one of the most deceitful in philosophy. Its adequate discussion would be the topic for a treatise. I can only indicate those elements in my analysis of it which are relevant to the present train of thought.

It is a false dichotomy to think of Nature and Man. Mankind is a factor in Nature which exhibits in its most intense form the plasticity of Nature.

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

The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things.

Often things realised in thought are more vivid than than the same things in inattentive physical experience. But the things apprehended as mental are always subject to the condition that we come to a stop when we come to explore ever higher grades of complexity in their realised relationships. We always find tat we have thought of just this — whatever it may be — and of no more.