Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

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.

it is presupposed that no entity can be conceived in complete abstraction from the system of the universe, and that it is the business of speculative philosophy to exhibit this truth. This character is its coherence.

Without adventure, civilization is in full decay.

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. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle — they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.

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

Science is a river with two sources, the practical source and the theoretical source.

Art should aim at the production of individuality in the component details of its compositions.

Philosophy destroys its usefulness when it indulges in brilliant feats of explaining away. It is then trespassing with the wrong equipment upon the field of particular sciences. Its ultimate appeal is to the general consciousness of what in practice we experience. Whatever thread of presupposition characterizes social expression throughout the various epochs of rational societyt must find its place in philosophic theory. Speculative boldness must be balanced by complete humility before logic, and before fact. It is a disease of philosophy when it is neither bold nor humble, but
merely a reflection of the temperamental presuppositions of exceptional personalities.

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

Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness; and if you are never solitary, you are never religious.

Life is an offensive directed against the repetitious mechanism of the universe.

That knowledge which adds greatness to character is knowledge so handled as to transform every phase of immediate experience.

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.

We all know Aesop’s fable of the dog who dropped a piece of meat to grasp at its reflection in the water. We must not, however, judge too severely of error. In the initial stages of mental progress, error in symbolic reference is the discipline which promotes imaginative freedom.

the business of Logic is not the analysis of generalities but their mingling.