Alfred North Whitehead Quotations | Page 3

In its solitariness the spirit asks, What, in the way of value, is the attainment of life? And it can find no such value till it has merged its individual claim with that of the objective universe. Religion is world-loyalty.

There is a quality of life which lies always beyond the mere fact of life; and when we include the quality in the fact, there is still omitted the quality of the quality.

The vastest knowledge of today cannot transcend the buddhi of the Rishis in ancient India; and science in its most advanced stage now is closer to Vedanta than ever before.

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

Problems are only opportunities in disquise.

But in the prevalent discussion of classes, there are illegitimate transitions to the notions of a 'nexus' and of a 'proposition'. The appeal to a class to perform the services of a proper entity is exactly analogous to an appeal to an imaginary terrier to kill a real rat. Process and Reality

The result of teaching small parts of a large number of subjects is the passive reception of disconnected ideas, not illumed with any spark of vitality.

The learned tradition is not concerned with truth, but with the learned adjustment of learned statements of antecedent learned people.

Mathematics, in its widest significance, is the development of all types of formal, necessary, deductive reasoning.

Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilisation of knowledge.

Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions.

Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness. Thus religion is solitariness; and if you are never solitary, you are never religious.

You think the world is what it looks like in fine weather at noon day; I think it is what it seems like in the early morning when one first wakes from deep sleep.

A Unitarian is a person who believes in at most one God.

In England if something goes wrong--say, if one finds a skunk in the garden--he writes to the family solicitor, who proceeds to take the proper measures; whereas in America, you telephone the fire department. Each satisfies a characteristic need; in the English, love of order and legalistic procedure; and here in America, what you like is something vivid, and red, and swift.

In a living civilization there is always an element of unrest, for sensitiveness to ideas means curiosity, adventure, change. Civilized order survives on its merits and is transformed by its power of recognizing its imperfections.

Education which is not modern share the fate of all organic things which are kept too long.

If you have had your attention directed to the novelties in thought in your own lifetime, you will have observed that almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced, and almost any idea which jogs you out of your current abstractions may be better than nothing.

Life is the enjoyment of emotion, derived from the past and aimed at the future.

Nobody has a right to speak more clearly than he thinks.

We must produce a great age, or see the collapse of the upward striving of our race.

The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanation of complex facts... Seek simplicity and distrust it.

Our rate of progress is such that an individual human being, of ordinary length of life, will be called on to face novel situations which find no parallel in his past. The fixed person, for the fixed duties, who, in older societies was such a godsend, in the future will be a public danger.

It is not paradox to say that in our most theoretical moods we may be nearest to our most practical applications.

Knowledge keeps no better than fish.

The main importance of Francis Bacon's influence does not lie in any peculiar theory of inductive reasoning which he happened to express, but in the revolt against second-hand information of which he was a leader.

Faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology.

A man really writes for an audience of about ten persons. Of course if others like it, that is clear gain. But if those ten are satisfied, he is content.

Without adventure all civilization is full of decay. Adventure rarely reaches its predetermined end. Columbus never reached China.

Error itself may be happy chance.

The difference between ancients and moderns is that the ancients asked what have we experienced, and moderns asked what can we experience.

No reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the ground of rationality.

Governments are best classified by considering who are the "somebodies" they are in fact endeavoring to satisfy.

Seek simplicity, then distrust.

The world is shocked, or amused, by the sight of saintly old people hindering in the name of morality the removal of obvious brutalities from a legal system.

Fertilization of the soul is the reason for the necessity of art.

Art heightens the sense of humanity. It gives an elation to feeling which is supernatural...A million sunsets will not spur us on towards civilization. It requires Art to evoke into consciousness the finite perfections which lie ready for human achievement.

The vigor of civilized societies is preserved by the widespread sense that high aims are worth-while.

But harmony is limitation. Thus rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality. Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing.

The purpose of education is not to fill a vessel but to kindle a flame.

Vigorous societies harbor a certain extravagance of objectives, so that men wander beyond the safe provision of personal gratifications.

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 saying the radium is scarce. . . . How scarce? You cannot evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music, and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves.

There is a tradition of opposition between adherents of induction and of deduction. In my view it would be just as sensible for the two ends of a worm to quarrel.

There are two principles inherent in the very nature of things, recurring in some particular embodiments whatever field we explore - the spirit of change, and the spirit of conservation. There can be nothing real without both. Mere change without conservation is a passage from nothing to nothing. . . . Mere conservation without change cannot conserve. For after all, there is a flux of circumstance, and the freshness of being evaporates under mere repetition.

...the self-satisfied dogmatism with which mankind at each period of its history cherishes the delusion of the finality of existing modes of knowledge.

War can protect; it cannot create.

Do not teach too many subjects and what you teach, teach thoroughly.

In order to acquire learning, we must first shake ourselves free of it.

There is no greater hindrance to the progress of thought than an attitude of irritated party-spirit.

What we perceive as the present is the vivid fringe of memory tinged with anticipation.

Every intellectual revolution which has ever stirred humanity into greatness has been a passionate protest against inert ideas. Then, alas, with pathetic ignorance of human psychology, it has proceeded by some educational scheme to bind humanity afresh with inert ideas of its own fashioning.

Systems, scientific or philosophic, come and go. Each method of limited understanding is at length exhausted. In its prime each system is a triumphant success: in its decay it is an obstructive nuisance.

[In many circumstances,] the most important thing about a proposition is not that it be true, but that it be interesting.

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.

The ultimate metaphysical ground is the creative advance into novelty.

The preternatural solemnity of a good many of the professionally religious is to me a point against them.

What the learned world tends to offer is one second-hand scrap of information illustrating ideas derived from another second-hand scrap of information. The second-handedness of the learned world is the secret of its mediocrity.

The worst that happened to men of science was that Galileo suffered an honorable detention and a mild reproof, before dying peacefully in his bed.

People make the mistake of talking about 'natural laws.' There are no natural laws. There are only temporary habits of nature.

The human body is an instrument for the production of art in the life of the human soul.

Religion is the reaction of human nature to its search for God.

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

The fact of the religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience.

The point about zero is that we do not need to use it in the operations of daily life. No one goes out to buy zero fish. It is in a way the most civilised of all the cardinals, and its use is only forced on us by the needs of cultivated modes of thought.

Routine is the god of every social system; it is the seventh heaven of business, the essential component in the success of every factory, the ideal of every statesman. The social machine should run like clockwork.

No religion can be considered in abstraction from its followers, or even from its various types of followers.

The Universe is vast. Nothing is more curious than the self-satisfied dogmatism with which mankind at each period of its history cherishes the delusion of the finality of existing modes of knowledge. Skeptics and believers are alike. At this moment scientists and skeptics are the leading dogmatists. Advance in detail is admitted; fundamental novelty is barred. This dogmatic common sense is the death of philosophic adventure.

In this modern world, the celibacy of the medieval learned class has been replaced by a celibacy of the intellect which is divorced from the concrete contemplation of the complete facts.

To be an abstraction does not mean that an entity is nothing. It merely means that its existence is only a factor of a more concrete element of nature.

The oneness of the universe, and the oneness of each element of the universe, repeat themselves to the crack of doom in the creative advance from creature to creature, each creature including in itself the whole of history and exemplifying the self-identity of things and their mutual diversities.

To see what is general in what is particular, and what is permanent in what is transitory, is the aim of scientific thought.

I consider Christianity to be one of the great disasters of the human race... It would be impossible to imagine anything more un - Christianlike than theology.

Rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality.

Value is coextensive with reality.

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

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience...

It is the business of future to be dangerous.... The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur.

The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanation of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be ``Seek simplicity and distrust it.''

Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within, the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realised; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest.

Without adventure civilization is in full decay.

One main factor in the upward trend of animal life has been the power of wandering.

There is no nature in an instant.

The chief error in philosophy is overstatement.

Apart from blunt truth, our lives sink decadently amid the perfume of hints and suggestions.

Education should turn out the pupil with something he knows well and something he can do well.

Ninety percent of our lives is governed by emotion. Our brains merely register and act upon what is telegraphed to them by our bodily experience. Intellect is to emotion as our clothes are to our bodies; we could not very well have civilized life without clothes, but we would be in a poor way if we had only clothes without bodies.

Great people plant trees they'll never sit under.

Every really new idea looks crazy at first.

It belongs to the self-respect of intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final unravelment.

The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention.

Religion is what a man does with his solitariness.

The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment.

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

It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.

Common sense is genius in homespun.

There is no nature at an instant.

How the past perishes is how the future becomes.

Religion is what a person does in his solitariness.

Each human being is a more complex structure than any social system to which he belongs.

In all education the main cause of failure is staleness.