Alfred North Whitehead Mind Quotations

The new tinge to modern minds is a vehement and passionate interest in the relation of general principles to irreducible and stubborn facts. All the world over and at all times there have been practical men, absorbed in 'irreducible and stubborn facts'; all the world over and at all times there have been men of philosophic temperament, who have been absorbed in the weaving of general principles. It is this union of passionate interest in the detailed facts with equal devotion to abstract generalisation which forms the novelty of our present society.

The importance of an individual thinker owes something to chance. For it depends upon the fate of his ideas in the minds of his successors.

An open mind is all very well in its way, but it ought not to be so open that there is no keeping anything in or out of it.

Style, in its finest sense, is the last acquirement of the educated mind; it is also the most useful. It pervades the whole being.

Vedanta is the most impressive metaphysics the human mind has conceived.

Above all things we must be aware of what I will call 'inert ideas' - that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilized, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations.

Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of life is to grasp as much as we can out of that infinitude.

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

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