Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

He has been named respectively, Jehovah, Allah, Brahma, Father in Heaven, Order of Heaven, First Cause, Supreme Being, Chance. Each name corresponds to a system of thought derived from the experiences of those who have used it. Among medieval and modern philosophers, anxious to establish the religious significance of God, an unfortunate habit has prevailed of paying Him metaphysical compliments. He has been conceived as the foundation of the metaphysical situation with its ultimate activity. If this conception be adhered to, there can be no alternative except to discern in Him the origin of all evil as well as of all good. He is then the supreme author of the play, and to Him must therefore be ascribed its shortcomings as well as its success.

It is the first step in sociological wisdom, to
recognize that the major advances in civilization
are processes which all but wreck the societies in
which they occur : — like unto an arrow in the
hand of a child.

A clash of doctrines is not a disaster — it is an opportunity.

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

I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the great wealth of general ideas scattered through them.

His personal endowments, his wide opportunities for experience at a great period of civilization, his inheritance of an intellectual tradition not yet stiffened by excessive systematization, have made his writings an inexhaustible mine of suggestion.

The mountain endures. But when after ages it has worn away, it has gone. If a replica arises, it is yet a new mountain.

A colour is eternal. It haunts time like a spirit. It comes and it goes. But where it comes, it is the same colour. It neither survives nor does it live.

We think in generalities, but we live in details.

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.

This doctrine of necessity in universality means that there is an essence to the universe which forbids relationships beyond itself, as a violation of its rationality. Speculative philosophy seeks that essence.

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

The nineteenth century exaggerated the power of the historical method, and assumed as a matter of course that every character should be studied only in its embryonic stage. Thus, for example, “Love” has been studied among the savages and latterly among the morons.

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.

We think in generalities, but we live in detail.

But some closeness of status, such as the relation of parent to child or the relation of marriage, can produce the love of self-devotion where the potentialities of the loved object are felt passionately as a claim that it find itself in a friendly Universe.

The consequences of a plethora of half-digested theoretical knowledge are deplorable.