Alfred North Whitehead

1:Knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows.
~ Alfred North Whitehead,

2:Wisdom is the fruit of a balanced development. ~ Alfred North Whitehead

3:Nobody has a right to speak more clearly than he thinks. ~ Alfred North Whitehead

4:A student should not be taught more than he can think about. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

5:The purpose of thinking is to let the ideas die instead of us dying. ~ Alfred North Whitehead

6:Great dreamers' dreams are never fulfilled, they are always transcended. ~ Alfred North Whitehead

7:From the very beginning of his education, the child should experience the joy of discovery. ~ Alfred North Whitehead

8:...the only simplicity to be trusted is the simplicity to be found on the far side of complexity.
~ Alfred North Whitehead,

9:... almost any idea which jogs you out of your current abstractions may be better than nothing. (575) ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

10:Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them.
~ Alfred North Whitehead,

11:Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern. ~ Alfred North Whitehead

12:The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. ... Seek simplicity and distrust it. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

13:Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.
~ Alfred North Whitehead,

14:This dogmatic common sense is the death of philosophic adventure. The Universe is vast. ~ A N Whitehead, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead,

15:There are no whole truths, all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

16:Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended. ~ Alfred North Whitehead

17:Biology is the study of the larger organisms, whereas physics is the study of the smaller organisms. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World,

18:A civilisation which cannot burst through its current abstractions is doomed to sterility after a very limited period of progress. (575) ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

19: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

20: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.
~ Alfred North Whitehead,

21:The foundation of reverence is this perception, that the present holds within itself the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, that whole amplitude of time, which is eternity. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

22:... outside of the book-knowledge which is necessary to our professional training, I think I got most of my development from the good conversation to which I have always had the luck to access. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

23:The great social ideal for religion is that it should be the common basis for the unity of civilization. In that way it justifies its insight beyond the transient clash of brute forces ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures In Ideas,

24:The true method of discovery is like the flight of an airplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality,

25:The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment... We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this great science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics,

26:Connectedness is of the essence of all things of all types. It is of the essence of types, that they be connected. Abstraction from connectedness involves the omission of an essential factor in the fact considered. No fact is merely itself. The penetration of literature and art at their height arises from our dumb sense that we have passed beyond mythology; namely, beyond the myth of isolation. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought

27: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

* WISDOM TROVE *

* NEWFULLDB 2.4M *

1:Seek simplicity, then distrust. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

2:Seek simplicity but distrust it. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

3:Error itself may be happy chance. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

4:Seek simplicity, and distrust it. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

5:There is no nature at an instant. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

6:There is no nature in an instant. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

7:Knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

8:Value is coextensive with reality. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

9:War can protect; it cannot create. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

10:Common sense is genius in homespun. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

11:Knowledge keeps no better than fish. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

12:Philosophy is the product of wonder. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

13:The motive of success is not enough. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

14:Knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows.
~ Alfred North Whitehead,

15:Error is the price we pay for progress. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

16:Dogmatism is the anti-Christ of learning. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

17:Russell is a Platonic dialogue in himself. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

18:Every really new idea looks crazy at first. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

19:Problems are only opportunities in disquise. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

20:Knowledge does not keep any better than fish. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

21:The many become one and are increased by one. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

22:Religion is the last refuge of human savagery. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

23:Spoken language is merely a series of squeaks. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

24:Wisdom is the fruit of a balanced development. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

25:Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

26:The chief error in philosophy is overstatement. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

27:How the past perishes is how the future becomes. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

28:We think in generalities, but we live in detail. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

29:When success turns a man's head he faces failure ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

30:Without adventure civilization is in full decay. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

31:Great people plant trees they'll never sit under. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

32:It is the business of the future to be dangerous. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

33:We think in generalities, but we live in details. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

34:You may not divide the seamless coat of learning. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

35:Intolerance is the besetting sin of moral fervour. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

36:Religion is what a man does with his solitariness. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

37:Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

38:Ninety percent of our lives is governed by emotion. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

39:Religion is what a person does in his solitariness. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

40:Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

41:Ideas won't keep; something must be done about them. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

42:Everyone is a philosopher. Not everyone is good at it. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

43:There are no whole truths: All truths are half-truths. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

44:A science that hesitates to forget its founders is lost. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

45:A Unitarian is a person who believes in at most one God. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

46:In all education the main cause of failure is staleness. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

47:Nobody has a right to speak more clearly than he thinks. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

48:A science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

49:Philosophy asks the simple question: What is it all about? ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

50:Religion is what an individual does with his solitariness. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

51:Rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

52:A clash of doctrine is not a disaster, it is an opportunity. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

53:A student should not be taught more than he can think about. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

54:Rationalism is an adventure in the clarification of thought. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

55:The race that does not value trained intelligence is doomed. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

56:A student should not be taught more than he can think about. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

57:Thus the negative perception is the triumph of consciousness. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

58:The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

59:No Roman ever died in contemplation over a geometrical diagram. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

60:Religion is the reaction of human nature to its search for God. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

61:Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

62:Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

63:Civilizations can only be understood by those who are civilized. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

64:Learning preserves the errors of the past as well as its wisdom. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

65:The English never abolish anything. They put it in cold storage. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

66:Vigorous societies harbour a certain extravagance of objectives. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

67:Fertilization of the soul is the reason for the necessity of art. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

68:It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

69:Above all things we must be aware of what I will call 'inert ideas' ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

70:The pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

71:Youth is life as yet unblemished by much tragedy, but hardly by TV. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

72:Do not teach too many subjects and what you teach, teach thoroughly. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

73:Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance is the death of knowledge. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

74:The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

75:A culture is in its finest flower before it begins to analyze itself. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

76:Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

77:The merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

78:The only use of knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

79:The ultimate metaphysical ground is the creative advance into novelty. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

80:In order to acquire learning, we must first shake ourselves free of it. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

81:The purpose of education is not to fill a vessel but to kindle a flame. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

82:Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilisation of knowledge. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

83:Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

84:Great dreamers' dreams are never fulfilled, they are always transcended. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

85:Knowledge is always accompanied with accessories of emotion and purpose. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

86:Vedanta is the most impressive metaphysics the human mind has conceived. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

87:It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

88:The certainty of mathematics depends on its complete abstract generality. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

89:The future belongs to those who can rise above the confines of the earth. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

90:Apart from God every activity is merely a passing whiff of insignificance. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

91:Heaven knows what seeming nonsense may not tomorrow be demonstrated truth. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

92:No member of a crew is praised for the rugged individuality of his rowing. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

93:The chief danger to philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

94:An enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

95:When you're average, you're just as close to the bottom as you are the top. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

96:It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

97:Panic of error is the death of progress, and love of truth is its safeguard. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

98:The "silly" question is the first intimation of some totally new development ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

99:Algebra reverses the relative importance of the factors in ordinary language. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

100:Intolerance is the besetting sin of moral fervour. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (1933),

101:I would be a billionaire if I was looking to be a selfish boss. That's not me. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

102:Nature, even in the act of satisfying anticipation, often provides a surprise. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

103:Speak out in acts; the time for words has passed, and only deeds will suffice. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

104:Education with inert ideas is not only useless; it is above all things harmful. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

105:The 'silly question' is the first intimation of some totally novel development. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

106:Life is the enjoyment of emotion, derived from the past and aimed at the future. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

107:Get your knowledge quickly and then use it. If you can use it you will retain it. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

108:I consider Christian theology to be one of the great disasters of the human race. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

109:Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

110:Everything of importance has already been seen by someone who did not discover it. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

111:Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

112:It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

113:Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

114:Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

115:...The modern fading of interest in religion. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925),

116:God is the unlimited conceptual realization of the absolute wealth of potentiality. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

117:One main factor in the upward trend of animal life has been the power of wandering. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

118:Nature is probably quite indifferent to the aesthetic preferences of mathematicians. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

119:The defense of morals is the battle-cry which best rallies stupidity against change. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

120:The term many presupposes the term one , and the term one presupposes the term many. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

121:We must produce a great age, or see the collapse of the upward striving of our race. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

122:Science is a river with two sources, the practical source and the theoretical source. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

123:The consequences of a plethora of half-digested theoretical knowledge are deplorable. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

124:The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead has advised us to “seek simplicity and distrust it. ~ Scott Richard Shaw,

125:Almost all new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

126:Not a sentence or a word is independent of the circumstances under which it is uttered. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

127:The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

128:The art of progress is to reserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

129:What we perceive as the present is the vivid fringe of memory tinged with anticipation. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

130:Each human being is a more complex structure than any social system to which he belongs. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

131:Imagination is not to be divorced from the facts. It is a way of illuminating the facts. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

132:The human body is an instrument for the production of art in the life of the human soul. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

133:Aristotle discovered all the half-truths which were necessary to the creation of science. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

134:Mathematics as an Element in the History of Thought. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925),

135:A man of science doesn't discover in order to know, he wants to know in order to discover. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

136:Error is the price we pay for progress. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929),

137:In a sense, knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows: for details are swallowed up in principles. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

138:There is only one subject matter for education, and that is Life in all its manifestations ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

139:A great society is a society in which its men of business think greatly of their functions. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

140:Education which is not modern share the fate of all organic things which are kept too long. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

141:From the very beginning of his education, the child should experience the joy of discovery. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

142:Apart from blunt truth, our lives sink decadently amid the perfume of hints and suggestions. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

143:No science can be more secure than the unconscious metaphysics which tacitly it presupposes. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

144:Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

145:Education should turn out the pupil with something he knows well and something he can do well. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

146:For the kingdom of heaven is with us today. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929),

147:Inventive genius requires pleasurable mental activity as a condition for its vigorous exercise ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

148:The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

149:No reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the ground of rationality. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

150:The power of Christianity lies in its revelation in act, of that which Plato divined in theory. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

151:The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

152:The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (1933),

153:The only justification in the use of force is to reduce the amount of force necessary to be used. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

154:...the only simplicity to be trusted is the simplicity to be found on the far side of complexity. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

155:True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes, but the firm resolve of virtue and reason. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

156:The chief error in philosophy is overstatement. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929),

157:Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

158:...the only simplicity to be trusted is the simplicity to be found on the far side of complexity.
~ Alfred North Whitehead,

159:There is no greater hindrance to the progress of thought than an attitude of irritated party-spirit. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

160:A precise language awaits a completed metaphysics. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929),

161:Every human being is the natural guardian of his own importance. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925),

162:From the moment of birth we are immersed in action, and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

163:The vigor of civilized societies is preserved by the widespread sense that high aims are worth-while. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

164:... almost any idea which jogs you out of your current abstractions may be better than nothing. (575) ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

165:Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilisation of knowledge. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education (1929),

166:Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

167:The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, seek simplicity and distrust it. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

168:It belongs to the self-respect of intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final unravelment. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

169:The preternatural solemnity of a good many of the professionally religious is to me a point against them. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

170:Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

171:Change’ is the description of the adventures of eternal objects in the evolving universe of actual things. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

172:Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them.
~ Alfred North Whitehead,

173:Philosophy begins in wonder. And at the end when philosophic thought has done its best the wonder remains. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

174:Symbolism is no mere idle fancy or corrupt degeneration: it is inherent in the very texture of human life. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

175:The aims of scientific thought are to see the general in the particular and the eternal in the transitory. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

176:The art of progress,” wrote Alfred North Whitehead, “is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order. ~ Dan John,

177:The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanation of complex facts... Seek simplicity and distrust it. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

178:The real history does not get written, because it is not in people's brains but in their nerves and vitals. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

179:The English never abolish anything. They put it in cold storage. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954),

180:Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (1933),

181:No religion can be considered in abstraction from its followers, or even from its various types of followers. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

182:Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

183:...The pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit... ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925),

184:It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925),

185:Life is complex in its expression, involving more than percipience, namely desire, emotion, will, and feeling. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

186:Science repudiates philosophy. In other words, it has never cared to justify its truth or explain its meaning. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

187:Rationalism is an adventure in the clarification of thought. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929),

188:Religion increasingly is tending to degenerate into a decent formula wherewith to embellish a comfortable life. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

189:The absolute pacifist is a bad citizen; times come when force must be used to uphold right, justice and ideals. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

190:The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. ... Seek simplicity and distrust it. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

191:The worship of God is not a rule of safety - it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

192:Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.
~ Alfred North Whitehead,

193:A culture is in its finest flower before it begins to analyze itself. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954),

194:Governments are best classified by considering who are the 'somebodies' they are in fact endeavouring to satisfy. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

195:It is not paradox to say that in our most theoretical moods we may be nearest to our most practical applications. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

196:Mathematics, in its widest significance, is the development of all types of formal, necessary, deductive reasoning. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

197:The consequences of a plethora of half-digested theoretical knowledge are deplorable. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education (1929),

198:The deliberate aim at Peace very easily passes into its bastard substitute, Anesthesia. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (1933),

199:The fixed person for the fixed duties who in older societies was such a godsend, in future will be a public danger. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

200:You cannot be wise without some basis of knowledge, but you may easily acquire knowledge and remain bare of wisdom. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

201:Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

202:In the conditions of modern life the rule is absolute, the race which does not value trained intelligence is doomed. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

203:On the ostensible exactitude of certain branches of human knowledge, including mathematics. The exactness is a fake. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

204:Scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

205:The human body is an instrument for the production of art in the life of the human soul. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (1933),

206:Each creative act is the universe incarnating itself as one, and there is nothing above it by way of final condition. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

207:The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

208:Every epoch has its character determined by the way its population reacts to the material events which they encounter. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

209:Seek simplicity, but distrust it,” Alfred North Whitehead, the mathematician and philosopher, once advised his students. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee,

210:The point about zero is that we do not need to use it in the operation of daily life. No one goes out to buy zero fish. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

211:There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

212:Algebra is the intellectual instrument which has been created for rendering clear the quantitative aspects of the world. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

213:There are no whole truths, all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

214:[In many circumstances,] the most important thing about a proposition is not that it be true, but that it be interesting. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

215:The whole of mathematics consists in the organization of a series of aids to the imagination in the process of reasoning. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

216:A duration is a concrete slab of nature limited by simultaneity which is an essential factor disclosed in sense-awareness. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

217:Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them. –Alfred North Whitehead ~ Robert B Cialdini,

218:I have always noticed that deeply and truly religious persons are fond of a joke, and I am suspicious of those who aren't. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

219:I have always noticed that deeply and truly religious persons are fond of a joke, and I am suspicious of those who aren’t. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

220:Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct form ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

221:Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

222:There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays to the devil. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

223:The total absence of humor from the Bible,” Alfred North Whitehead once observed, “is one of the most singular things in all literature. ~ Jim Holt,

224: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

225:Human nature loses its most precious quality when it is robbed of its sense of things beyond, unexplored and yet insistent. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

226:Faraday was asked: "What is the use of this discovery?"
He answered: "What is the use of a child - it grows to be a man. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

227:Shakespeare wrote better poetry for not knowing too much; Milton, I think, knew too much finally for the good of his poetry. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

228:The science of pure mathematics, in its modern developments, may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

229:To see what is general in what is particular, and what is permanent in what is transitory, is the aim of scientific thought. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

230:That knowledge which adds greatness to character is knowledge so handled as to transform every phase of immediate experience. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

231:The chief danger to philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929),

232:After you understand about the sun and the stars and the rotation of the earth, you may still miss the radiance of the sunset. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

233:Necessity is the mother of invention" is a silly proverb. "Necessity is the mother of futile dodges" is much nearer the truth. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

234:People make the mistake of talking about 'natural laws.' There are no natural laws. There are only temporary habits of nature. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

235:If a dog jumps in your lap, it is because he is fond of you; but if a cat does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

236:Some of the finest moral intuitions come to quite humble people. The visiting of lofty ideas doesn't depend on formal schooling. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

237:It is the business of the future to be dangerous; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

238:Seek simplicity, but distrust it,” Alfred North Whitehead, the mathematician and philosopher, once advised his students. Dobzhansky ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee,

239:All practical teachers know that education is a patient process of mastery of details, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

240:Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure, a sense of nothing having been done before, of complete freedom to experiment. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

241:As society is now constituted, a literal adherence to the moral precepts scattered throughout the Gospels would mean sudden death. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

242:If a dog jumps into your lap, it is because he is fond of you; but if a cat does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

243:Style, in its finest sense, is the last acquirement of the educated mind; it is also the most useful. It pervades the whole being. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

244:The great achievements of the past were the adventures of the past. Only the adventurous can understand the greatness of the past. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

245:The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

246:Without adventure all civilization is full of decay. Adventure rarely reaches its predetermined end. Columbus never reached China. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

247:[A]ll science as it grows towards perfection becomes mathematical in its ideas. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics (1911) Ch.1, p. 14.,

248:The degeneracy of mankind is distinguished from its uprise by the dominance of chill abstractions, divorced from aesthetic content. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

249:The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925),

250:You cannot evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music, and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

251:Every organism requires an environment of friends, partly to shield it from violent changes, and partly to supply it with its wants. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

252:It is a safe rule to apply that, when a mathematical or philosophical author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

253:Each generation criticizes the unconscious assumptions made by its parent. It may assent to them, but it brings them out in the open. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

254:The physical doctrine of the atom has got into a state which is strongly suggestive of the epicycles of astronomy before Copernicus . ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

255:We cannot think first and act afterwards. From the moment of birth we are immersed in action and can only guide it by taking thought. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

256:The learned tradition is not concerned with truth, but with the learned adjustment of learned statements of antecedent learned people. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

257:The term many presupposes the term one, and the term one presupposes the term many. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929),

258: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

259:It is impossible to meditate on time and the mystery of nature without an overwhelming emotion at the limitations of human intelligence. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

260:Vigorous societies harbor a certain extravagance of objectives, so that men wander beyond the safe provision of personal gratifications. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

261:A civilisation which cannot burst through its current abstractions is doomed to sterility after a very limited period of progress. (575) ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

262:No one who achieves success does so without acknowledging the help of others. The wise and confident acknowledge this help with gratitude. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

263:Philosophy is the product of wonder. The effort after the general characterization of the world around us is the romance of human thought. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

264:The difference between ancients and moderns is that the ancients asked what have we experienced, and moderns asked what can we experience. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

265:The paradox is now fully established that the utmost abstractions are the true weapons with which to control our thought of concrete fact. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

266:The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929),

267: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

268:The rhythm is then the life, in the sense in which it can be said to be included within nature. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, The Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919),

269:The task of a university is the creation of the future, so far as rational thought and civilized modes of appreciation can affect the issue. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

270:The tragedy of the world is that those who are imaginative have but slight experience, and those who are experienced have feeble imaginations. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

271:Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

272:Learning preserves the errors of the past, as well as its wisdom. For this reason, dictionaries are public dangers, although they are necessities. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

273: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

274:It is a false dichotomy to think of Nature and Man. Mankind is a factor in Nature which exhibits in its most intense form the plasticity of Nature. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

275:We think in generalities, but we live in detail. To make the past live, we must perceive it in detail in addition to thinking of it in generalities. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

276:The foundations of the world are to be found, not in the cognitive experience of conscious thought, but in the aesthetic experience of everyday life. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

277:We must not expect simple answers to far-reaching questions. However far our gaze penetrates, there are always heights beyond which block our vision. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

278:Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment in recognition of the pattern. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954),

279:In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

280:Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness. Thus religion is solitariness; and if you are never solitary, you are never religious. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

281: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

282:...the self-satisfied dogmatism with which mankind at each period of its history cherishes the delusion of the finality of existing modes of knowledge. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

283: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

284: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

285:The relevant poems are Milton's Paradise Lost, Pope's Essay on Man, Wordsworth's Excursion, Tennyson's In Memoriam. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925),

286: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

287: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

288:As Alfred North Whitehead once put it, “those who devote themselves to the purpose of proving that there is no purpose constitute an interesting subject for study. ~ Edward Feser,

289:In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of a defeat; but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress towards a victory. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

290:I put forward as a general definition of civilization, that a civilized society is exhibiting the five qualities of Truth, Beauty, Adventure, Art, Peace. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

291:Identification of rhythm as the casual counterpart of life; wherever there is some life, only perceptible to us when the analogies are sufficiently close. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

292:Life is complex in its expression, involving more than percipience, namely desire, emotion, will, and feeling. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, The Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919),

293:Disputing the commonsense notion that all events require the prior existence of some underlying matter or substance. There is no antecedent static cabinet. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

294:Peace is self-control at its widest-at the width where the "self" has been lost, and interest has been transferred to coordinations wider than personality. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

295:That knowledge which adds greatness to character is knowledge so handled as to transform every phase of immediate experience. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education (1929),

296:It is this union of passionate interest in the detailed facts with equal devotion to abstract generalisation which forms the novelty in our present society . ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

297:It must be admitted that there is a degree of instability which is inconsistent with civilization. But, on the whole, the great ages have been unstable ages. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

298: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

299:But harmony is limitation. Thus rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality. Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

300:Without adventure civilization is in full decay. ... The great fact [is] that in their day the great achievements of the past were the adventures of the past. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

301:A general definition of civilization: a civilized society is exhibiting the five qualities of truth, beauty, adventure, art, peace. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (1933),

302: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

303:Kecerdasan adalah kecepatan untuk memahami segala sesuatu,
sedangkan kemampuan adalah kesanggupan untuk bertindak bijaksana dalam menghadapi segala sesuatu. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

304:An unflinching determination to take the whole evidence into account is the only method of preservation against the fluctuating extremes of fashionable opinion. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

305:Faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

306:In every age of well-marked transition, there is the pattern of habitual dumb practice and emotion which is passing and there is oncoming a new complex of habit. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

307:The science of pure mathematics, in its modern developments, may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925),

308: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

309:There are deeper types of symbolism, in a sense artificial, and yet such that we could not get on without them. Language, written or spoken, is such a symbolism. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

310: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

311: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

312:There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954),

313:With the sense of sight, the idea communicates the emotion, whereas, with sound, the emotion communicates the idea, which is more direct and therefore more powerful. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

314:Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954),

315:It is the business of the future to be dangerous; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925),

316:Many years ago Alfred North Whitehead cogently observed, “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. ~ David Allen,

317:"One and one make two" assumes that the changes in the shift of circumstance are unimportant. But it is impossible for us to analyze this notion of unimportant change. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

318:But the purpose of philosophy is to rationalize mysticism: not by explaining it away, but by the introduction of novel verbal characterizations, rationally coordinated. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

319:Shakespeare wrote better poetry for not knowing too much; Milton, I think, knew too much finally for the good of his poetry. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954),

320:No man of science wants merely to know. He acquires knowledge to appease his passion for discovery. He does not discover in order to know, he knows in order to discover. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

321:In the words of the English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, “Civilization advances by extending the number of operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”19 ~ Gerd Gigerenzer,

322: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

323:It is a safe rule to apply that, when a mathematical or philosophical author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics (1911),

324: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

325: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

326: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

327:Wisdom alone is true ambition's aim, wisdom is the source of virtue and of fame; obtained with labour, for mankind employed, and then, when most you share it, best enjoyed. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

328:So far as the mere imparting of information is concerned, no university has had any justification for existence since the popularization of printing in the fifteenth century. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

329: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.
~ Alfred North Whitehead,

330: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

331:It is natural to think that an abstract science cannot be of much importance in affairs of human life, because it has omitted from its consideration everything of real interest. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

332:The true task of education, Alfred North Whitehead cautioned, is to abjure stale knowledge. “Knowledge does not keep any better than fish,” he said. We need to keep it alive, vital, potent. ~ Howard Zinn,

333:Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle—they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments. —ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD ~ Ray Kurzweil,

334: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954),

335:The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929),

336:No reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the ground of rationality. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925), Chapter XI. New York: Mentor Books, 1948, p. 179,

337:...We cannot think first and act afterwards. From the moment of birth we are immersed in action and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925),

338: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925),

339:The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervor, live for it, and if need be, die for it. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

340: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

341: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

342:In a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

343:A simple rule in dealing with those who are hard to get along with is to remember that this person is striving to assert his superiority; and you must deal with him from that point of view ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

344:I always feel that I have two duties to perform with a parting guest: one, to see that he doesn't forget anything that is his; the other, to see that he doesn't take anything that is mine. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

345:In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of a defeat; but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress towards victory. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925),

346:The foundation of reverence is this perception, that the present holds within itself the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, that whole amplitude of time, which is eternity. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

347:The antithesis between a technical and a liberal education is fallacious. There can be no adequate technical education which is not liberal, and no liberal education which is not technical. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

348:The foundation of reverence is this perception, that the present holds within itself the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, that whole amplitude of time, which is eternity. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

349:The justification for a university is that it preserves the connection between knowledge and the zest of life, by uniting the young and the old in the imaginative consideration of learning. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

350:There is nothing in the real world which is merely an inert fact. Every reality is there for feeling: it promotes feeling; and it is felt. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929),

351:Mathematics as a science, commenced when first someone, probably a Greek, proved propositions about "any" things or about "some" things, without specifications of definite particular things. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

352:The factor in human life provocative of a noble discontent is the gradual emergence of a sense of criticism, founded upon appreciation of beauty, and of intellectual distinction, and of duty. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

353:Learning is often spoken of as if we are watching the open pages of all the books which we have ever read, and then, when occasion arises, we select the right page to read aloud to the universe. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

354:Our habitual experience is a complex of failure and success in the enterprise of interpretation. If we desire a record of uninterpreted experience, we must ask a stone to record its autobiography. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

355: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954),

356: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

357:Identification of rhythm as the causal counterpart of life; wherever there is some life, only perceptible to us when the analogies are sufficiently close. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, The Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919),

358:Now in creative thought common sense is a bad master. Its sole criterion for judgement is that the new ideas shall look like the old ones. In other words it can only work by suppressing originality. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

359:There is no more common error than to assume that, because prolonged and accurate mathematical calculations have been made, the application of the result to some fact of nature is absolutely certain. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

360:Whether or no it be for the general good, life is robbery. It is at this point that with life morals become acute. The robber requires justification. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929),

361:No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

362: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

363:Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science. Its principles may be eternal, but the expression of those principles requires continual development. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

364:It does not matter what men say in words, so long as their activities are controlled by settled instincts. The words may ultimately destroy the instincts; but until this has occurred, words do not count. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

365: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

366:The ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929),

367:God is in the world, or nowhere, creating continually in us and around us. Insofar as man partakes of this creative process does he partake of the divine, of God, and that participation is his immortality. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

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

369:The great social ideal for religion is that it should be the common basis for the unity of civilization. In that way it justifies its insight beyond the transient clash of brute forces ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures In Ideas,

370:There is a technique, a knack, for thinking, just as there is for doing other things. You are not wholly at the mercy of your thoughts, any more than they are you. They are a machine you can learn to operate. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

371:With the sense of sight, the idea communicates the emotion, whereas, with sound, the emotion communicates the idea, which is more direct and therefore more powerful. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954),

372:This doctrine of necessity in universality means that there is an essence to the universe which forbids relationships beyond itself, as a violation of its rationality. Speculative philosophy seeks that essence. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

373: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics (1911),

374: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

375:Scientists, animated by the purpose of proving they are purposeless, constitute an interesting subject for study. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, The Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919)The Function of Reason (1929), Beacon Books, 1958, p. 16,

376: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

377:it is presupposed that no entity can be conceived in complete abstraction from the system of the universe, and that it is the business of speculative philosophy to exhibit this truth. This character is its coherence. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

378:To come very near to a true theory, and to grasp its precise application, are two different things, as the history of science teaches us. Everything of importance has been said before by someone who did not discover it. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

379: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954),

380:The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

381:I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning, or destroyed it altogether. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

382:Some philosophers fail to distinguish propositions from judgements; ... But in the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. The importance of truth is that it adds to interest. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

383: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

384:In modern times the belief that the ultimate explanation of all things was to be found in Newtonian mechanics was an adumbration of the truth that all science, as it grows towards perfection, becomes mathematical in its ideas. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

385: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

386:The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervor, live for it, and, if need be, die for it. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954),

387:I am also greatly indebted to Bergson, William James, and John Dewey. One of my preoccupations has been to rescue their type of thought from the charge of anti-intellectualism, which rightly or wrongly has been associated with it. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

388: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

389:My criticism of Hegel procedure is that when in his discussion he arrives at a contradiction, he construes it as a crisis in the universe. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

390:The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order. Life refuses to be embalmed alive. The more prolonged the halt in some unrelieved system of order, the greater the crash of the dead society. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

391:Systems, scientific and 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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (1933),

392:We do not require elaborate training merely in order to refrain from embarking upon intricate trains of inference. Such abstinence is only too easy. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, The Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919)Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (1927).,

393:The word “experience” is one of the most deceitful in philosophy. Its adequate discussion would be the topic for a treatise. I can only indicate those elements in my analysis of it which are relevant to the present train of thought. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

394:Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science. Its principles may be eternal, but the expression of those principles requires continual development. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925),

395: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

396:It will be evident to you that I am here controverting the most cherished tradition of modern philosophy, shared alike by the school of empiricists which derives from Hume, and the school of transcendental idealists which derives from Kant. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

397: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education (1929),

398: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

399:No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954),

400:of the limited perspective always includes some additional factors of the background. The entity is then experienced in a wider finite perspective, still presupposing the inevitable background which is the universe in its relation to that entity. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

401:Our habitual experience is a complex of failure and success in the enterprise of interpretation. If we desire a record of uninterpreted experience, we must ask a stone to record its autobiography. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929),

402:Rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality.

Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing. The limitation, and the basis arising from what is already actual, are both of them necessary and interconnected. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

403:Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of human life is to grasp as much as we can out of the infinitude. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954),

404:Whenever a text-book is written of real educational worth, you may be quite certain that some reviewer will say that it will be difficult to teach from it. Of course it will be difficult to teach from it. It it were easy, the book ought to be burned. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

405:It builds cathedrals before the workmen have moved a stone, and it destroys them before the elements have worn down their arches. It is the architect of the buildings of the spirit, and it is also their solvent: - and the spiritual precedes the material. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

406: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

407: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

408:Order is not sufficient. What is required, is something much more complex. It is order entering upon novelty; so that the massiveness of order does not degenerate into mere repetition; and so that the novelty is always reflected upon a background of system. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

409: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education (1929),

410:It is a profoundly erroneous truism that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

411:The teleology of the Universe is directed to the production of Beauty... The type of Truth required for the final stretch of Beauty is a discovery and not a recapitulation... Apart from Beauty, Truth is neither good, nor bad... Truth matters because of beauty. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

412:The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature throughout the centuries is the notion of 'independent existence.' There is no such mode of existence; every entity is to be understood in terms of the way it is interwoven with the rest of the universe. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

413:The nineteenth century exaggerated the power of the historical method, and assumed as a matter of course that every character should be studied only in its embryonic stage. Thus, for example, “Love” has been studied among the savages and latterly among the morons. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

414:The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

415: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. A certain amount of encouragement is necessary." ~ Alfred North Whitehead in Lucien Price, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954), p. 66,

416:In training a child to activity of thought, above all things we must beware of what I will call "inert ideas"—that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilised, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education (1929),

417:A race preserves its vigour so long as it harbours a real contrast between what has been and what may be, and so long as it is nerved by the vigour to adventure beyond the safeties of the past. Without adventure, civilization is in full decay. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (1933),

418:Some philosophers fail to distinguish propositions from judgments; … But in the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. The importance of truth is that it adds to interest. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929),

419: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

420: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

421:I regret that it has been necessary for me in this lecture to administer a large dose of four-dimensional geometry. I do not apologize, because I am really not responsible for the fact that nature in its most fundamental aspect is four-dimensional. Things are what they are. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

422:We think in generalities, but we live in detail. To make the past live, we must perceive it in detail in addition to thinking of it in generalities. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, The Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919)"The Education of an Englishman" in The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 138 (1926), p. 192.,

423:The power of God is the worship He inspires.... The worship of God is not a rule of safety — it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable. The death of religion comes with the repression of the high hope of adventure. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925),

424:More and more it is becoming evident that what the West can most readily give to the East is its science and its scientific outlook. This is transferable from country to country, and from race to race, wherever there is a rational society. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925),

425:The theme of Cosmology, which is the basis of all religions, is the story of the dynamic effort of the World passing into everlasting unity, and of the static majesty of God's vision, accomplishing its purpose of completion by absorption of the World's multiplicity of effort. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

426:The worship of God is not a rule of safety—it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable. The death of religion comes with the repression of the high hope of adventure. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925), Chapter XII. New York: Mentor Books, 1948, p. 192,

427:Presentational immediacy is our immediate perception of the contemporary external world, appearing as an element constitutive of our own experience. In this appearance the world discloses itself to be a community of actual things, which are actual in the same sense as we are. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

428:The mountain endures. But when after ages it has worn away, it has gone. If a replica arises, it is yet a new mountain.

A colour is eternal. It haunts time like a spirit. It comes and it goes. But where it comes, it is the same colour. It neither survives nor does it live. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

429:Without deductive logic science would be entirely useless. It is merely a barren game to ascend from the particular to the general, unless afterwards we can reverse the process and descend from the general to the particular, ascending and descending like angels on Jacob's ladder. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

430: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925),

431:The ideas of Freud were popularized by people who only imperfectly understood them, who were incapable of the great effort required to grasp them in their relationship to larger truths, and who therefore assigned to them a prominence out of all proportion to their true importance. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

432:The merit of Locke's 'Essay Concerning Human Understanding' is its adequacy, and not its consistency. . . He should have widened the title of his book into 'An Essay Concerning Experience. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

433:We all know Aesop’s fable of the dog who dropped a piece of meat to grasp at its reflection in the water. We must not, however, judge too severely of error. In the initial stages of mental progress, error in symbolic reference is the discipline which promotes imaginative freedom. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

434:I am sure that one secret of a successful teacher is that he has formulated quite clearly in his mind what the pupil has got to know in precise fashion. He will then cease from half-hearted attempts to worry his pupils with memorizing a lot of irrelevant stuff of inferior importance. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

435: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

436: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, The Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919)Religion in the Making (February 1926), Lecture II: "Religion and Dogma".,

437:The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment... We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this great science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

438:The true method of discovery is like the flight of an airplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality,

439: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

440: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

441:In a sense, knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows, for details are swallowed up in principles. The details for knowledge which are important, will be picked up ad hoc in each avocation of life, but the habit of the active utilization of well-understood principles is the final possession of WISDOM. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

442:The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations 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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

443:The way in which the persecution of Galileo has been remembered is a tribute to the quiet commencement of the most intimate change in outlook which the human race had yet encountered. Since a babe was born in a manger, it may be doubted whether so great a thing has happened with so little stir ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

444: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.'' ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

445: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

446:Other nations of different habits are not enemies: they are godsends. Men require of their neighbours something sufficiently akin to be understood, something sufficiently different to provoke attention, and something great enough to command admiration. We must not expect, however, all the virtues. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

447:There remains the final reflection, how shallow, puny, and imperfect are efforts to sound the depths in the nature of things. In philosophical discussion, the merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement is an exhibition of folly. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929),

448:Forty years ago the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead thought it self-evident that you would get a good government if you took power out of the hands of the acquisitive and gave it to the learned and the cultivated. At present, a child in kindergarten knows better than that. ~ Eric Hoffer, Before the Sabbath (1979), p. 40-41,

449:Such a conception is paradoxical if you will persist in thinking of the actual world as a collection of passive actual substances with their private characters or qualities. In that case, it must be nonsense to ask, how one such substance can form a component in the make-up of another such substance. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

450: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

451:It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. This statement is almost a tautology. For the energy of operation of a proposition in an occasion of experience is its interest and is its importance. But of course a true proposition is more apt to be interesting than a false one. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

452:The mentality of mankind and the language of mankind created each other. If we like to assume the rise of language as a given fact, then it is not going too far to say that the souls of men are the gift from language to mankind. The account of the sixth day should be written: He gave them speech, and they became souls. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

453:In the inescapable flux, there is something that abides; in the overwhelming permanence, there is an element that escapes into flux. Permanence can be snatched only out of flux; and the passing moment can find its adequate intensity only by its submission to permanence. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929),

454:Religion, according to Alfred North Whitehead, is a phenomenon that begins in wonder and ends in wonder. Feelings of awe, reverence, and gratitude are primary, and these can never be learned from books. We gain them from sitting high on a cliff side, gazing at the sea, lost in reverie and listening to the laughter of children. ~ Gary A Kowalski,

455: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education (1929),

456: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

457:The ideas of Freud were popularized by people who only imperfectly understood them, who were incapable of the great effort required to grasp them in their relationship to larger truths, and who therefore assigned to them a prominence out of all proportion to their true importance. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954),

458:The theme of Cosmology, which is the basis of all religions, is the story of the dynamic effort of the World passing into everlasting unity, and of the static majesty of God's vision, accomplishing its purpose of completion by absorption of the World's multiplicity of effort. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929),

459:The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment... We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this great science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics (1911),

460:The progress of Science consists in observing interconnections and in showing with a patient ingenuity that the events of this ever-shifting world are but examples of a few general relations, called laws. To see what is general in what is particular, and what is permanent in what is transitory, is the aim of scientific thought. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

461: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

462: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929),

463:It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

464:It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

465: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, The Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919)Religion in the Making (February 1926), Lecture II: "Religion and Dogma".,

466: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

467:The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations 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." ~ Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature (1919), Chapter VII, p.143.,

468: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929),

469:It is the ideal of speculative philosophy that its fundamental notions shall not seem capable of abstraction from each other. In other words, it is presupposed that no entity can be conceived in complete abstraction from the system of the universe, and that it is the business of speculative philosophy to exhibit this truth. This character is its coherence. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

470: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925),

471:Creativity is the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact. It is that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively. It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929),

472:Inventive genius requires pleasurable mental activity as a condition for its vigorous exercise. "Necessity is the mother of invention" is a silly proverb. "Necessity is the mother of futile dodges" is much closer to the truth. The basis of growth of modern invention is science, and science is almost wholly the outgrowth of pleasurable intellectual curiosity. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

473:Rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality.
Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing. The limitation, and the basis arising from what is already actual, are both of them necessary and interconnected. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, The Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919)Religion in the Making (February 1926), Lecture IV: "Truth and Criticism".,

474:The vitality of thought is in adventure. Idea's won't keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervour, live for it, and, if need be, die for it. Their inheritors receive the idea, perhaps now strong and successful, but without inheriting the fervour; so the idea settles down to a comfortable middle age, turns senile, and dies. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

475:In the history of the world the prize has not gone to those species which specialized in methods of violence, or even in defensive armor. In fact, nature began with producing animals encased in hard shells for defense against the ill of life. But smaller animals, without external armor, warm-blooded, sensitive, alert, have cleared those monsters off the face of the earth. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

476:The ideas of Freud were popularized by people who only imperfectly understood them, who were incapable of the great effort required to grasp them in their relationship to larger truths, and who therefore assigned to them a prominence out of all proportion to their true importance. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

477: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954),

478: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

479:In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as it were a mist, cloaking the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

480:In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as if it were a mist, cloaking the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reasoning grasps at straws for premises and float on gossamer for deductions. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

481:Philosophers can never hope finally to formulate these metaphysical first principles. Weakness of insight and deficiencies of language stand in the way inexorably. Words and phrases must be stretched towards a generality foreign to their ordinary usage; and however such elements of language be stabilized as technicalities, they remain metaphors mutely appealing for an imaginative leap. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

482:Connectedness is of the essence of all things of all types. It is of the essence of types, that they be connected. Abstraction from connectedness involves the omission of an essential factor in the fact considered. No fact is merely itself. The penetration of literature and art at their height arises from our dumb sense that we have passed beyond mythology; namely, beyond the myth of isolation. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

483:Great art is more than a transient refreshment. It is something which adds to the permanent richness of the soul's self-attainment. It justifies itself both by its immediate enjoyment, and also by its discipline of the inmost being. Its discipline is not distinct from enjoyment but by reason of it. It transforms the soul into the permanent realization of values extending beyond its former self. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

484:In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as if it were a mist, cloaking the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reasoning grasps at straws for premises and float on gossamer for deductions. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (1933),

485:The renowned British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead recognized this inescapable quality of modern life when he asserted that “civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them.” Take, for example, the “advance” offered to civilization by the discount coupon, which allows consumers to assume that they will receive a reduced purchase price by presenting the coupon. ~ Robert B Cialdini,

486: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. That would be claiming too much. 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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

487:We think of the number "five" as applying to appropriate groups of any entities whatsoever - to five fishes, five children, five apples, five days... We are merely thinking of those relationships between those two groups which are entirely independent of the individual essences of any of the members of either group. This is a very remarkable feat of abstraction; and it must have taken ages for the human race to rise to it ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

488: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

489:Nothing is more impressive than the fact that as mathematics withdrew increasingly into the upper regions of ever greater extremes of abstract thought, it returned back to earth with a corresponding growth of importance for the analysis of concrete fact. ...The paradox is now fully established that the utmost abstractions are the true weapons with which to control our thought of concrete fact. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925),

490:Nothing is more impressive than the fact that as mathematics withdrew increasingly into the upper regions of ever greater extremes of abstract thought, it returned back to earth with a corresponding growth of importance for the analysis of concrete fact. ...The paradox is now fully established that the utmost abstractions are the true weapons with which to control our thought of concrete fact. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925).,

491: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

492:In the history of education, the most striking phenomenon is that schools of learning, which at one epoch are alive with a ferment of genius, in a succeeding generation exhibit merely pedantry and routine. The reason is, that they are overladen with inert ideas. Education with inert ideas is not only useless: it is, above all things, harmful—Corruptio optimi, pessima [the corruption of the best is the worst]. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education (1929),

493:In the conditions of modern life the rule is absolute, the race which does not value trained intelligence is doomed. Not all your heroism, not all your social charm, not all your wit, not all your victories on land or at sea, can move back the finger of fate. To-day we maintain ourselves. To-morrow science will have moved forward yet one more step, and there will be no appeal from the judgment which will then be pronounced on the uneducated. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

494:For successful education there must always be a certain freshness in the knowledge dealt with. It must be either new in itself or invested with some novelty of application to the new world of new times. Knowledge does not keep any better than fish. You may be dealing with knowledge of the old species, with some old truth; but somehow it must come to the students, as it were, just drawn out of the sea and with the freshness of its immediate importance. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

495: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

496:Let me here remind you that the essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things. This inevitableness of destiny can only be illustrated in terms of human life by incidents which in fact involve unhappiness. For it is by them that the futility of escape can be made evident in the drama. This remorseless inevitableness is what pervades scientific thought. The laws of physics are the decrees of fate. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

497: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

498:Thus the universe is to be conceived as attaining the active self-expression of its own variety of opposites of its own freedom and its own necessity, of its own multiplicity and its own unity, of its own imperfection and its own perfection. All the opposites are elements in the nature of things, and are incorrigibly there. The concept of God is the way in which we understand this incredible fact that what cannot be, yet is. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929),

499: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

500:For successful education there must always be a certain freshness in the knowledge dealt with. It must be either new in itself or invested with some novelty of application to the new world of new times. Knowledge does not keep any better than fish. You may be dealing with knowledge of the old species, with some old truth; but somehow it must come to the students, as it were, just drawn out of the sea and with the freshness of its immediate importance. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education (1929),

501:The point of mathematics is that in it we have always got rid of the particular instance, and even of any particular sorts of entities. So that for example, no mathematical truths apply merely to fish, or merely to stones, or merely to colours. So long as you are dealing with pure mathematics, you are in the realm of complete and absolute abstraction. . . . Mathematics is thought moving in the sphere of complete abstraction from any particular instance of what it is talking about. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

502:The vigour of civilised societies is preserved by the widespread sense that high aims are worth while. Vigorous societies harbour a certain extravagance of objectives, so that men wander beyond the safe provision of personal gratifications. All strong interests easily become impersonal, the love of a good job well done. There is a sense of harmony about such an accomplishment, the Peace brought by something worth while. Such personal gratification arises from aim beyond personality. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

503:Many a scientist has patiently designed experiments for the purpose of substantiating his belief that animal operations are motivated by no purposes. He has perhaps spent his spare time in writing articles to prove that human beings are as other animals so that 'purpose' is a category irrelevant for the explanation of their bodily activities, his own activities included. Scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

504:Philosophy, in one of its functions, is the critic of cosmologies. It is its function to harmonise, refashion, and justify divergent intuitions as to the nature of things. It has to insist on the scrutiny of the ultimate ideas, and on the retention of the whole of the evidence in shaping our cosmological scheme. Its business is to render explicit, and — so far as may be — efficient, a process which otherwise is unconsciously performed without rational tests. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925),

505:The worth of men consists in their liability to persuasion. They can persuade and can be persuaded by the disclosure of alternatives, the better and the worse. Civilization is the maintenance of social order, by its own inherent persuasiveness as embodying the nobler alternative. The recourse to force, however, unavoidable, is a disclosure of the failure of civilization, either in the general society or in a remnant of individuals. Thus in a live civilization there is always an element of unrest. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

506: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 realized; 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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925),

507:Where numbers only represent real things, you don’t need a number to express the absence of something. It is an abstract concept and only shows up when the math gets equally abstract. “The point about zero is that we do not need to use it in the operations of daily life,” wrote Alfred North Whitehead, the British mathematician, in 1911. “No one goes out to buy zero fish. It is in a way the most civilized of all the cardinal [numbers], and its use is only forced on us by the needs of cultivated modes of thought. ~ Chris Anderson,

508:In the history of education, the most striking phenomenon is that schools of learning, which at one epoch are alive with a ferment of genius, in a succeeding generation exhibit merely pedantry and routine. The reason is, that they are overladen with inert ideas. Education with inert ideas is not only useless: it is, above all things, harmful - Corruptio optimi, pessima [the corruption of the best is the worst]. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, “The Aims of Education,” Presidential address to the Mathematical Association of England, 1916,

509:SCIENCE AROSE ONLY IN Europe because only medieval Europeans believed that science was possible and desirable. And the basis of their belief was their image of God and his creation. This was dramatically asserted to a distinguished audience of scholars attending the 1925 Lowell Lectures at Harvard by the great philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), who explained that science developed in Europe because of the widespread “faith in the possibility of science... derivative from medieval theology. ~ Rodney Stark,

510:Richard Foster is justified in writing: I am concerned that our reading and our writing is gravitating to the lowest common denominator so completely that the great themes of majesty and nobility and felicity are made to seem trite, puny, pedestrian. . . . I am concerned about the state of the soul in the midst of all the cheap sensory overload going on today. You see, without what Alfred North Whitehead called “an habitual vision of greatness,” our soul will shrivel up and lose the capacity for beauty and mystery and transcendence. . . . ~ John Piper,

511:The essence of education is that it be religious. Pray, what is religious education? A religious education is an education which inculcates duty and reverence. Duty arises from our potential control over the course of events. Where attainable knowledge could have changed the issue, ignorance has the guilt of vice. And the foundation of reverence is this perception, that the present holds within itself the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, that whole amplitude of time, which is eternity. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education (1929),

512:It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle — they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics (1911),

513:It is impossible not to feel stirred at the thought of the emotions of man at certain historic moments of adventure and discovery - Columbus when he first saw the Western shore, Pizarro when he stared at the Pacific Ocean, Franklin when the electric spark came from the string of his kite, Galileo when he first turned his telescope to the heavens. Such moments are also granted to students in the abstract regions of thought, and high among them must be placed the morning when Descartes lay in bed and invented the method of co-ordinate geometry. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

514: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

515:In the conditions of modern life the rule is absolute, the race which does not value trained intelligence is doomed. Not all your heroism, not all your social charm, not all your wit, not all your victories on land or at sea, can move back the finger of fate. To-day we maintain ourselves. To-morrow science will have moved forward yet one more step, and there will be no appeal from the judgment which will then be pronounced on the uneducated. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, "The Aims of Education—a Plea for Reform," The Organisation of Thought, chapter 1, p. 28 (1917, reprinted 1974).,

516:By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and in effect increases... mental power... Probably nothing in the modern world would have more astonished a Greek mathematician than to learn that, under the influence of compulsory education, the whole population of Western Europe, from the highest to the lowest, could perform the operation of division for the largest numbers. This fact would have seemed to him a sheer impossibility. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics (1911) Ch. 5, p. 59.,

517:There is finitude—unless this were true, infinity would have no meaning. The contrast of finitude and infinity arises from the fundamental metaphysical truth that every entity involves an indefinite array of perspectives, each perspective expressing a finite characteristic of that entity. But any one finite perspective does not enable an entity to shake off its essential connection with totality. The infinite background always remains as the unanalysed reason why that finite perspective of that entity has the special character that it does have. Any analysis ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

518:a man named Aristocles, whose very broad shoulders got him the nickname Plato. One of the most influential minds in human history – Alfred North Whitehead, himself no intellectual slouch, characterized all of Western philosophy as a series of footnotes to Plato8 – he played a central role in redirecting philosophy away from arbitrary speculations about the nature of existence, and toward close attention to how human beings know what exists and what doesn’t. Even if you’ve never read a word Plato wrote, you use concepts he invented practically every time you think. ~ John Michael Greer,

519:I would not go so far as to say that to construct a history of thought without a profound study of the mathematical ideas of successive epochs is like omitting Hamlet from the play which is named after him. That would be claiming too much. 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. 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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

520:Religion is the reaction of human nature to its search for God. The presentation of God under the aspect of power awakens every modern instinct of critical reaction. This is fatal; for religion collapses unless its main positions command immediacy of assent. In this respect the old phraseology is at variance with the psychology of modern civilisations. This change in psychology is largely due to science, and is one of the chief ways in which the advance of science has weakened the hold of the old religious forms of expression. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925),

521:The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the great wealth of general ideas scattered through them.

His personal endowments, his wide opportunities for experience at a great period of civilization, his inheritance of an intellectual tradition not yet stiffened by excessive systematization, have made his writings an inexhaustible mine of suggestion. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

522:PROCESS PHILOSOPHY, a school greatly influenced by Alfred North Whitehead, holds that mind and brain are manifestations of a single reality, one that is in constant flux. It thus is compatible with classical Buddhist philosophy, which views clear and penetrating awareness of change and impermanence (anicca in Pali) as the essence of insight. Thus, as Whitehead put it, "The reality is the process," and it is a process made up of vital transient "drops of experience, complex, and interdependent." This view is strikingly consistent with recent developments in quantum physics. ~ Jeffrey M Schwartz,

523:The essence of Christianity is the appeal to the life of Christ as a revelation of the nature of God and of God's agency in the world. The record is fragmentary, inconsistent, and uncertain. . . . But there can be no doubt as to what elements in the record have evoked a response from all that is best in human nature. The Mother, the Child, and the bare manger: the lowly man, homeless and self-forgetful, with his message of peace, love, and sympathy: the suffering, the agony, the tender words as life ebbed, the final despair: and the whole with the authority of supreme victory. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

524: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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925),

525:We find here the final application of the doctrine of objective immortality. Throughout the perishing occasions in the life of each temporal Creature, the inward source of distaste or of refreshment, the judge arising out of the very nature of things, redeemer or goddess of mischief, is the transformation of Itself, everlasting in the Being of God. In this way, the insistent craving is justified — the insistent craving that zest for existence be refreshed by the ever-present, unfading importance of our immediate actions, which perish and yet live for evermore. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929),

526:When you are criticizing the philosophy of an epoch, do not chiefly direct your attention to those intellectual positions which its exponents feel it necessary explicitly to defend. There will be some fundamental assumptions which adherents to 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. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

527:He has been named respectively, Jehovah, Allah, Brahma, Father in Heaven, Order of Heaven, First Cause, Supreme Being, Chance. Each name corresponds to a system of thought derived from the experiences of those who have used it.... He has been conceived as the foundation of the metaphysical situation with its ultimate activity. If this conception be adhered to, there can be no alternative except to discern in Him the origin of all evil as well as of all good. He is then the supreme author of the play, and to him must therefore be ascribed its shortcomings as well as its success. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925),

528:There is a greatness in the lives of those who build up religious systems, a greatness in action, in idea and in self-subordination, embodied in instance after instance through centuries of growth. There is a greatness in the rebels who destroy such systems: they are the Titans who storm heaven, armed with passionate sincerity. It may be that the revolt is the mere assertion by youth of its right to its proper brilliance, to that final good of immediate joy. Philosophy may not neglect the multifariousness of the world — the fairies dance, and Christ is nailed to the cross. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929),

529:The truth is that science started its modern career by taking over ideas derived from the weakest side of the philosophies of Aristotle's successors. In some respects it was a happy choice. It enabled the knowledge of the seventeenth century to be formularised so far as physics and chemistry were concerned, with a completeness which has lasted to the present time. But the progress of biology and psychology has probably been checked by the uncritical assumption of half-truths. If science is not to degenerate into a medley of ad hoc hypothesis, it must become philosophical and must enter upon a thorough criticism of its own foundations. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

530:In the theory of well-ordered series and compact series, we have followed Cantor closely, except in dealing with Zermelo's theorem (*257—8), and in cases where Cantor's work tacitly assumes the multiplicative axiom. Thus what novelty there is, is in the main negative. In particular, the multiplicative axiom is required in all known proofs of the fundamental proposition that the limit of a progression of ordinals of the second class {i.e. applicable to series whose fields have ^{o terms) is an ordinal of the second class (cf *265). In consequence of this fact, a very large part of the recognized theory of transfinite ordinals must be considered doubtful. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

531:121. George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces
122. Max Planck – Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory; Where Is Science Going?; Scientific Autobiography
123. Henri Bergson – Time and Free Will; Matter and Memory; Creative Evolution; The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
124. John Dewey – How We Think; Democracy and Education; Experience and Nature; Logic; the Theory of Inquiry
125. Alfred North Whitehead – An Introduction to Mathematics; Science and the Modern World; The Aims of Education and Other Essays; Adventures of Ideas
126. George Santayana – The Life of Reason; Skepticism and Animal Faith; Persons and Places
127. Vladimir Lenin – The State and Revo ~ Mortimer J Adler,

532:These are the events which share the immediacy of the immediately present discerned events. These are the events whose characters together with those of the discerned events comprise all nature present for discernment. They form the complete general fact which is all nature now present as disclosed in that sense-awareness. It is in this second classification of events that the differentiation of space from time takes its origin. The germ of space is to be found in the mutual relations of events within the immediate general fact which is all nature now discernible, namely within the one event which is the totality of present nature. The relations of other events to this totality of nature form the texture of time. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

533:Philosophy finds religion, and modifies it; and conversely religion is among the data of experience which philosophy must weave into its own scheme. Religion is an ultimate craving to infuse into the insistent particularity of emotion that non-temporal generality which primarily belongs to conceptual thought alone. In the higher organisms the differences of tempo between the mere emotions and the conceptual experiences produce a life-tedium, unless this supreme fusion has been effected. The two sides of the organism require a reconciliation in which emotional experiences illustrate a conceptual justification, and conceptual experiences find an emotional illustration. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929),

534:It is the first step in sociological wisdom, to recognize that the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur:—like unto an arrow in the hand of a child. The art of free society consists first in the maintenance of the symbolic code; and secondly in fearlessness of revision, to secure that the code serves those purposes which satisfy an enlightened reason. Those societies which cannot combine reverence to their symbols with freedom of revision, must ultimately decay either from anarchy, or from the slow atrophy of a life stifled by useless shadows. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, The Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919)Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (1927), chapter 3, p. 88; final paragraph of the book.,

535:Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity. Each actual occasion contributes to the circumstances of its origin additional formative elements deepening its own peculiar individuality. Consciousness is only the last and greatest of such elements by which the selective character of the individual obscures the external totality from which it originates and which it embodies. An actual individual, of such higher grade, has truck with the totality of things by reason of its sheer actuality; but it has attained its individual depth of being by a selective emphasis limited to its own purposes. The task of philosophy is to recover the totality obscured by the selection. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929),

536: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. Before the introduction of the Arabic notation, multiplication was difficult, and the division even of integers called into play the highest mathematical faculties. Probably nothing in the modern world would have more astonished a Greek mathematician than to learn that … a huge proportion of the population of Western Europe could perform the operation of division for the largest numbers. This fact would have seemed to him a sheer impossibility…. Our modern power of easy reckoning with decimal fractions is the almost miraculous result of the gradual discovery of a perfect notation. —Alfred North Whitehead ~ Steve McConnell,

537:Religion carries two sorts of people in two entirely opposite directions: the mild and gentle people it carries towards mercy and justice; the persecuting people it carries into fiendish sadistic cruelty. Mind you, though this may seem to justify the eighteenth-century Age of Reason in its contention that religion is nothing but an organized, gigantic fraud and a curse to the human race, nothing could be farther from the truth. It possesses these two aspects, the evil one of the two appealing to people capable of naïve hatred; but what is actually happening is that when you get natures stirred to their depths over questions which they feel to be overwhelmingly vital, you get the bad stirred up in them as well as the good; the mud as well as the water. It doesn't seem to matter much which sect you have, for both types occur in all sects.... ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

538:In all philosophic theory there is an ultimate which is actual in virtue of its accidents. It is only then capable of characterization through its accidental embodiments, and apart from these accidents is devoid of actuality. In the philosophy of organism this ultimate is termed creativity; and [[God] is its primordial, non-temporal accident. In monistic philosophies, Spinoza's or absolute idealism, this ultimate is God, who is also equivalently termed The Absolute. In such monistic schemes, the ultimate is illegitimately allowed a final, eminent reality, beyond that ascribed to any of its accidents. In this general position the philosophy of organism seems to approximate more to some strains of Indian, or Chinese, thought, than to western Asiatic, or European, thought. One side makes process ultimate; the other side makes fact ultimate. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929),

539:The solution which I am urging is to eradicate the fatal disconnection of subjects which kills the vitality of our modern curriculum. There is only one subject-matter for education, and that is LIfe in all its manifestations. Instead of this single unity, we offer children--Algebra, from which nothing follows; Geometry, from which nothing follows; Science, from which nothing follows; History, from which nothing follows; a Couple of Languages, never mastered; and lastly, most dreary of all, Literature, represented by plays of Shakespeare, with philological notes and short analyses of plot and character to be in substance committed to memory. Can such a list be said to represent Life, as it is known in the midst of living it? The best that can be said of it is, that it is a rapid table of contents which a deity might run over in his mind while he was thinking of creating a world, and has not yet determined how to put it together ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

540:The universities are schools of education, and schools of research. But the primary reason for their existence is not to be found either in the mere knowledge conveyed to the students or in the mere opportunities for research afforded to the members of the faculty. Both these functions could be performed at a cheaper rate, apart from these very expensive institutions. Books are cheap, and the system of apprenticeship is well understood. So far as the mere imparting of information is concerned, no university has had any justification for existence since the popularization of printing in the fifteenth century. Yet the chief impetus to the foundation of universities came after that date, and in more recent times has even increased. The justification for a university is that it preserves the connection between knowledge and the zest of life, by uniting the young and the old in the imaginative consideration of learning. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education (1929),

541:[Beware of] the fallacy of misplaced concreteness [mistaking an abstraction for concrete reality, for actuality]

In the inescapable flux, there is something that abides; in the overwhelming permanence, there is an element that escapes into flux. Permanence can be snatched only out of flux; and the passing moment can find its adequate intensity only by its submission to permanence.

Error is the price we pay for progress.

In the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. The importance of truth is that it adds to interest.

Creativity is the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact. It is that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively. It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity.

The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations 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."

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

[From various of Whitehead's books, not only PR] ~ Alfred North Whitehead,

542:A woman's ability to achieve depends on childlessness or childcare. In America, where we don't believe in an underclass to do 'women's work', women themselves become the underclass. For love. Nobody doubts the love is real. It's for our children. But we are supposed to do it invisibly and never mention it. Alfred North Whitehead, who wasn't a woman after all, said that the truth of a society is what cannot be said. And women's work still cannot be said. It's called whining -- even by other women. It's called self-indulgence -- even by other women. Perhaps women writer are hated because abstraction makes oppression possible and we refuse to be abstract. How can we be? Our struggles are concrete: food, fire, babies, a room of one's own. These basics are rare -- even for the privileged. It is nothing short of a miracle every time a woman with a child finishes a book.
Our lives -- from the baby to the writing desk -- are the lives of the majority of humanity: never enough time to think, eternal exhaustion. The cared-for male elite, with female slaves to tend their bodily needs, can hardly credit our difficulties as 'real'. 'Real' is the deficit, oil wars in the Middle East, or how much of our children's milk the Pentagon shall get.
This is the true division in the world today: between those who carelessly say 'Third World' believing themselves part of the '¨First', and those who know they are the Third World -- wherever they live.
Women everywhere are the 'Third World', In my country, where most women do not feel part of what matters, they are thirdly third, trapped in the myth of being 'first'. ~ Erica Jong,

*** WISDOM TROVE ***

*** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***

WORDNET

* WISDOM TROVE *

* NEWFULLDB 2.4M *