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Quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

English mathematician & philosopher (1861 - 1947)

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

Through and through the world is infested with quantity. To talk sense is to talk quantities, It is no use saying the nation is large- how large? It is no use s aying that radium is scarce- how scarce? You can not evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves.

Nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent, the nightingale for its song; and the sun for its radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves and should turn them into odes of self congratulation on the excellence of the human mind.

I will not go so far as to say that to construct a history of thought without profound study of the mathematical ideas of successive epochs is like omitting Hamlet from the play which is named after him. . . But it is certainly analogous to cutting out the part of Ophelia. This simile is singularly exact. For Ophelia is quite essential to the play, she is very charming-- and a little mad.

We think in generalities, but we live in detail.

Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it. A merely well informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth.

The future belongs to those who can rise above the confines of the earth.

Seek simplicity, and distrust it.

I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning , or destroyed it altogether.

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

The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.

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

If a dog jumps in 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.

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 about them.

The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them.

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

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

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

Let us grant that the pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit, a refuge from the goading urgency of contingent happenings.

The poet, the artist, the sleuth - whoever sharpens our perception tends to be antisocial... he cannot go along with currents and trends.

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change.

Wisdom alone is true ambition's aim Wisdom the source of virtue, and of fame, Obtained with labor, for mankind employed, And then, when most you share it, best enjoyed.

The only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present. The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground; for it is the past, and it is the future.

But you can catch yourself entertaining habitually certain ideas and setting others aside; and that, I think, is where our personal destinies are largely decided.

An enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words.

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.