Alfred North Whitehead
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.
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.
Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.
The silly question is the first intimation of some totally new development.
Civilizations can only be understood by those who are civilized.
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.Collection: Independent
The purpose of education is not to fill a vessel but to kindle a flame.Collection: Flames
Great people plant trees they'll never sit under.Collection: Wisdom
There are no whole truths: All truths are half-truths.Collection: Truth
What we perceive as the present is the vivid fringe of memory tinged with anticipation.Collection: Memories
After you understand about the sun and the stars and the rotation of the earth, you may still miss the radiance of the sunset.Collection: Stars
Ninety percent of our lives is governed by emotion.Collection: Emotion
The difference between ancients and moderns is that the ancients asked what have we experienced, and moderns asked what can we experience.Collection: Differences
The worship of God is not a rule of safety - it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable.Collection: Adventure
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.Collection: Beauty
Everyone is a philosopher. Not everyone is good at it.Collection: Philosopher
Great dreamers' dreams are never fulfilled, they are always transcended.Collection: Dream
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 worldCollection: Mirrors
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.Collection: Beauty
Not a sentence or a word is independent of the circumstances under which it is uttered.Collection: Independent
Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilisation of knowledge.Collection: Art
Knowledge is always accompanied with accessories of emotion and purpose.Collection: Emotional
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.Collection: Passion
Religion is what a man does with his solitariness.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Educational
The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment.Collection: Disappointment
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.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Creativity
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 stirCollection: Race
Knowledge does not keep any better than fish.Collection: Doe
Philosophy is the product of wonder. The effort after the general characterization of the world around us is the romance of human thought.Collection: Philosophy
The physical doctrine of the atom has got into a state which is strongly suggestive of the epicycles of astronomy before Copernicus .Collection: Atoms
Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness.Collection: Religion
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.Collection: Writing
Mathematics, in its widest significance, is the development of all types of formal, necessary, deductive reasoning.Collection: Development
Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions.Collection: Reasoning
We must produce a great age, or see the collapse of the upward striving of our race.Collection: Success
Error itself may be happy chance.Collection: Errors
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.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Math
A Unitarian is a person who believes in at most one God.Collection: Believe
On the ostensible exactitude of certain branches of human knowledge, including mathematics. The exactness is a fake.Collection: Knowledge
Faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology.Collection: Development
[In many circumstances,] the most important thing about a proposition is not that it be true, but that it be interesting.Collection: Interesting
Inventive genius requires pleasurable mental activity as a condition for its vigorous exerciseCollection: Exercise
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.Collection: Airplane
Education with inert ideas is not only useless; it is above all things harmful.Collection: Education
Apart from God every activity is merely a passing whiff of insignificance.Collection: Motivational
Rationalism is an adventure in the clarification of thought.Collection: Adventure