Best 303 quotes of Alfred North Whitehead on MyQuotes

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.

A clash of doctrine is not a disaster, it is an opportunity.

A culture is in its finest flower before it begins to analyze itself.

After you understand about the sun and the stars and the rotation of the earth, you may still miss the radiance of the sunset.

A great society is a society in which its men of business think greatly of their functions.

Algebra is the intellectual instrument which has been created for rendering clear the quantitative aspects of the world.

Algebra reverses the relative importance of the factors in ordinary language.

Algebra reverses the relative importance of the factors in ordinary language. It is essentially a written language, and it endeavors to exemplify in its written structures the patterns which it is its purpose to convey. The pattern of the marks on paper is a particular instance of the pattern to be conveyed to thought. The algebraic method is our best approach to the expression of necessity, by reason of its reduction of accident to the ghostlike character of the real variable.

All practical teachers know that education is a patient process of mastery of details, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day.

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

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.

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

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.

An unflinching determination to take the whole evidence into account is the only method of preservation against the fluctuating extremes of fashionable opinion.

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

Apart from God every activity is merely a passing whiff of insignificance.

A philosopher of imposing stature doesn't think in a vacuum. Even his most abstract ideas are, to some extent, conditioned by what is or is not known in the time when he lives.

A race preserves its vigor so long as it harbors a real contrast between what has been and what may be; and so long as it is nerved by the vigor to adventure beyond the safeties of the past. Without adventure civilization is in full decay.

Aristotle discovered all the half-truths which were necessary to the creation of science.

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

Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure.

Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure, a sense of nothing having been done before, of complete freedom to experiment.

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.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience.

A science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost.

As society is now constituted, a literal adherence to the moral precepts scattered throughout the Gospels would mean sudden death.

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

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

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

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.

By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and in effect increases the mental power of the race.

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are cavalry charges in a battle - they are limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.

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

Civilizations can only be understood by those who are civilized.

Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it. A merely well informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth.

Democracy...is a society in which the unbeliever feels undisturbed and at home. If there were only a half dozen unbelievers in America, their well-being would be a test of our democracy.

Disputing the commonsense notion that all events require the prior existence of some underlying matter or substance. There is no antecedent static cabinet.

Dogmatism is the anti-Christ of learning.

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

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

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

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

Education with inert ideas is not only useless; it is above all things harmful.

Error itself may be happy chance.

Every epoch has its character determined by the way its population reacts to the material events which they encounter.

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.

Every organism requires an environment of friends, partly to shield it from violent changes, and partly to supply it with its wants.

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

Every really new idea looks crazy at first.

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