Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.

The art of progress is to reserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order.

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.

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 a victory.

Every really new idea looks crazy at first.

Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.

We think in generalities, but we live in detail. To make the past live, we must perceive it in detail in addition to thinking of it in generalities.

Nature is probably quite indifferent to the aesthetic preferences of mathematicians.

It is a profoundly erroneous truism 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.

We cannot think first and act afterwards. From the moment of birth we are immersed in action and can only guide it by taking thought.

The point about zero is that we do not need to use it in the operation of daily life. No one goes out to buy zero fish.

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.

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.

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

It is the business of the future to be dangerous; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties.