Top 15 Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance is the death of knowledge.

It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

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

Religion carries two sorts of people in two entirely opposite directions: the mild and gentle people it carries towards mercy and justice; the persecuting people it carries into fiendish sadistic cruelty. Mind you, though this may seem to justify the eighteenth-century Age of Reason in its contention that religion is nothing but an organized, gigantic fraud and a curse to the human race, nothing could be farther from the truth. It possesses these two aspects, the evil one of the two appealing to people capable of naïve hatred; but what is actually happening is that when you get natures stirred to their depths over questions which they feel to be overwhelmingly vital, you get the bad stirred up in them as well as the good; the mud as well as the water. It doesn't seem to matter much which sect you have, for both types occur in all sects....

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.

We think in generalities, but we live in details.

The purpose of thinking is to let the ideas die instead of us dying.

Philosophy begins in wonder. And at the end when philosophic thought has done its best the wonder remains.

...the only simplicity to be trusted is the simplicity to be found on the far side of complexity.

The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, 'Seek simplicity and distrust it.

From the very beginning of his education, the child should experience the joy of discovery.

There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.

Error is the price we pay for progress.

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