Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947)

Quotes

• 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.

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

• Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.

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

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

• 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.

• 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.