Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

It is the business of the future to be dangerous.. view

By: Alfred North Whitehead

No one who achieves success does so without acknowledging the help of others. The wise and confident acknowledge this help with gratitude... view

By: Alfred North Whitehead

If a dog jumps into your lap, it is because he is fond of you.. view

By: Alfred North Whitehead

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... view

By: Alfred North Whitehead

Ideas won't keep.. view

By: Alfred North Whitehead

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

By: Alfred North Whitehead

Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe... view

By: Alfred North Whitehead

Familiar things happen, and mankind does not bother about them. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious... view

By: Alfred North Whitehead

Fools act on imagination without knowledge, pedants act on knowledge without imagination... view

By: Alfred North Whitehead

Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas... view

By: Alfred North Whitehead

Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language... view

By: Alfred North Whitehead

I have always noticed that deeply and truly religious persons are fond of a joke, and I am suspicious of those who aren't... view

By: Alfred North Whitehead

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... view

By: Alfred North Whitehead

I would be a billionaire if I was looking to be a selfish boss. That's not me... view

By: Alfred North Whitehead

Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning... view

By: Alfred North Whitehead

Man can acquire accomplishments or he can become an animal, whichever he wants. God makes the animals, man makes himself... view

By: Alfred North Whitehead

Almost all new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced... view

By: Alfred North Whitehead

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

By: Alfred North Whitehead

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

By: Alfred North Whitehead

Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure... view

By: Alfred North Whitehead

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

By: Alfred North Whitehead

But you can catch yourself entertaining habitually certain ideas and setting others aside.. view

By: Alfred North Whitehead

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

By: Alfred North Whitehead

Common sense is genius in homespun... view

By: Alfred North Whitehead

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... view

By: Alfred North Whitehead

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

By: Alfred North Whitehead

Civilizations can only be understood by those who are civilized... view

By: Alfred North Whitehead

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

By: Alfred North Whitehead

It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious... view

By: Alfred North Whitehead

Knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows... view

By: Alfred North Whitehead

It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression... view

By: Alfred North Whitehead

Without adventure civilization is in full decay... view

By: Alfred North Whitehead

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

By: Alfred North Whitehead

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

By: Alfred North Whitehead

Religion is the last refuge of human savagery... view

By: Alfred North Whitehead

The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, seek simplicity and distrust it... view

By: Alfred North Whitehead

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato... view

By: Alfred North Whitehead

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

By: Alfred North Whitehead

The absolute pacifist is a bad citizen.. view

By: Alfred North Whitehead

Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language... view

By: Alfred North Whitehead

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... view

By: Alfred North Whitehead

Simple solutions seldom are. It takes a very unusual mind to undertake analysis of the obvious... view

By: Alfred North Whitehead