Words matter. These are the best Alfred North Whitehead Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I would be a billionaire if I was looking to be a selfish boss. That’s not me.
Seek simplicity but distrust it.
It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression.
The silly question is the first intimation of some totally new development.
Civilizations can only be understood by those who are civilized.
The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.
The absolute pacifist is a bad citizen; times come when force must be used to uphold right, justice and ideals.
In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory.
The task of a university is the creation of the future, so far as rational thought and civilized modes of appreciation can affect the issue.
Simple solutions seldom are. It takes a very unusual mind to undertake analysis of the obvious.
The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won’t keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervor, live for it, and if need be, die for it.
Wisdom alone is true ambition’s aim, wisdom is the source of virtue and of fame; obtained with labour, for mankind employed, and then, when most you share it, best enjoyed.
Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.
Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning.
It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.
Fools act on imagination without knowledge, pedants act on knowledge without imagination.
Ideas won’t keep; something must be done about them.
Familiar things happen, and mankind does not bother about them. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.
Knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows.
The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.
Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure.
We think in generalities, but we live in detail.
What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like and immorality is what they dislike.
Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.
It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious.
I have always noticed that deeply and truly religious persons are fond of a joke, and I am suspicious of those who aren’t.
If a dog jumps into your lap, it is because he is fond of you; but if a cat does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer.
True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes, but the firm resolve of virtue and reason.
Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of life is to grasp as much as we can out of that infinitude.
Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.
