Alfred North Whitehead Philosophy Quotations

Philosophy is the product of wonder. The effort after the general characterization of the world around us is the romance of human thought.

The chief danger to philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence.

Science repudiates philosophy. In other words, it has never cared to justify its truth or explain its meaning.

There will be some fundamental assumptions which adherents of all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them. With these assumptions a certain limited number of types of philosophic systems are possible, and this group of systems constitutes the philosophy of the epoch.

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

Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity.

Without doubt, if we are to go back to that ultimate, integral experience, unwarped by the sophistications of theory, that experience whose elucidation is the final aim of philosophy, the flux of things is one ultimate generalization around which we must weave our philosophical system.

Philosophy asks the simple question: What is it all about?

The chief error in philosophy is overstatement.

Philosophy is the product of wonder.

Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.