Alfred North Whitehead
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.Collection: Book
Style, in its finest sense, is the last acquirement of the educated mind; it is also the most useful. It pervades the whole being.Collection: Style
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.Collection: Men
There is no nature in an instant.Collection: Instant
The science of pure mathematics, in its modern developments, may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit.Collection: Math
Spoken language is merely a series of squeaks.Collection: Language
Governments are best classified by considering who are the 'somebodies' they are in fact endeavouring to satisfy.Collection: Government
...the only simplicity to be trusted is the simplicity to be found on the far side of complexity.Collection: Simplicity
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.Collection: Math
War can protect; it cannot create.Collection: War
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.Collection: Powerful
A great society is a society in which its men of business think greatly of their functions.Collection: Men
Education which is not modern share the fate of all organic things which are kept too long.Collection: Education
A clash of doctrine is not a disaster, it is an opportunity.Collection: Success
A man of science doesn't discover in order to know, he wants to know in order to discover.Collection: Men
Every really new idea looks crazy at first.Collection: Inspirational
The learned tradition is not concerned with truth, but with the learned adjustment of learned statements of antecedent learned people.Collection: People
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.Collection: Preoccupation
The only use of knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present.Collection: Past
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.Collection: Peace
Intolerance is the besetting sin of moral fervour.Collection: Moral
The 'silly question' is the first intimation of some totally novel development.Collection: Silly
One main factor in the upward trend of animal life has been the power of wandering.Collection: Nature
Religion increasingly is tending to degenerate into a decent formula wherewith to embellish a comfortable life.Collection: Life
Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness. Thus religion is solitariness; and if you are never solitary, you are never religious.Collection: Religious
It is not paradox to say that in our most theoretical moods we may be nearest to our most practical applications.Collection: May
Education should turn out the pupil with something he knows well and something he can do well.Collection: Inspirational
It belongs to the self-respect of intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final unravelment.Collection: Self
Human nature loses its most precious quality when it is robbed of its sense of things beyond, unexplored and yet insistent.Collection: Humanity
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.Collection: Math
There is only one subject matter for education, and that is Life in all its manifestationsCollection: Matter
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.Collection: Animal
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.Collection: Learning
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.Collection: Art
Science repudiates philosophy. In other words, it has never cared to justify its truth or explain its meaning.Collection: Philosophy
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.Collection: Teacher
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.Collection: Zero
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.Collection: Real
A culture is in its finest flower before it begins to analyze itself.Collection: Flower
You may not divide the seamless coat of learning.Collection: Coats
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.Collection: Lying
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.Collection: Desire
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.Collection: Effort
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.Collection: Success
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.Collection: Moving
The English never abolish anything. They put it in cold storage.Collection: Cold
Shakespeare wrote better poetry for not knowing too much; Milton, I think, knew too much finally for the good of his poetry.Collection: Thinking
Nature, even in the act of satisfying anticipation, often provides a surprise.Collection: Nature