Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

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...

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

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

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

The "silly" question is the first intimation of some totally new development

It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious.

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.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

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.

Life is complex in its expression, involving more than percipience, namely desire, emotion, will, and feeling.

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.

The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.

The factor in human life provocative of a noble discontent is the gradual emergence of a sense of criticism founded upon appreciation of beauty and of intellectual distinction and of duty.

No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it...

The major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur.

True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes, but the firm resolve of virtue and reason.

Let me here remind you that the essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things. This inevitableness of destiny can only be illustrated...

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

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.

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.