Alfred North Whitehead
The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanation of complex facts... Seek simplicity and distrust it.Collection: Simplicity
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.Collection: Real
Disputing the commonsense notion that all events require the prior existence of some underlying matter or substance. There is no antecedent static cabinet.Collection: Events
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.Collection: Math
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.Collection: Science
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.Collection: Ideas
Apart from blunt truth, our lives sink decadently amid the perfume of hints and suggestions.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Successful
The great achievements of the past were the adventures of the past. Only the adventurous can understand the greatness of the past.Collection: Adventure
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.Collection: Teaching
The fixed person for the fixed duties who in older societies was such a godsend, in future will be a public danger.Collection: Business
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.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Home
There is no greater hindrance to the progress of thought than an attitude of irritated party-spirit.Collection: Attitude
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.Collection: Change
Each generation criticizes the unconscious assumptions made by its parent. It may assent to them, but it brings them out in the open.Collection: Parent
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.Collection: Strong
...the self-satisfied dogmatism with which mankind at each period of its history cherishes the delusion of the finality of existing modes of knowledge.Collection: Dark
Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Science
To see what is general in what is particular, and what is permanent in what is transitory, is the aim of scientific thought.Collection: Ontology
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.Collection: Angel
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.Collection: Math
The power of Christianity lies in its revelation in act, of that which Plato divined in theory.Collection: Plato
In a sense, knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows: for details are swallowed up in principles.Collection: Knowledge
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.Collection: Philosophy
The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention.Collection: Invention
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.Collection: Past
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.Collection: Real
We must not expect simple answers to far-reaching questions. However far our gaze penetrates, there are always heights beyond which block our vision.Collection: Block
The whole of mathematics consists in the organization of a series of aids to the imagination in the process of reasoning.Collection: Math
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.Collection: Wisdom
The term many presupposes the term one , and the term one presupposes the term many.Collection: Term
Identification of rhythm as the casual counterpart of life; wherever there is some life, only perceptible to us when the analogies are sufficiently close.Collection: Analogies
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.Collection: Appreciation
The vigor of civilized societies is preserved by the widespread sense that high aims are worth-while.Collection: Vigor
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.Collection: Two
Algebra reverses the relative importance of the factors in ordinary language.Collection: Math
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.Collection: Education
All practical teachers know that education is a patient process of mastery of details, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day.Collection: Teacher
Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity.Collection: Philosophy
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.Collection: Mean
Every epoch has its character determined by the way its population reacts to the material events which they encounter.Collection: Character
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.Collection: Horse
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.Collection: Education
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.Collection: Zest
You cannot evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music, and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves.Collection: Numbers