44 Thought-Provoking Quotes By Alfred North Whitehead
Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance is the death of knowledge.
It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.
Philosophy begins in wonder. And at the end when philosophic thought has done its best the wonder remains.
Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.
We think in generalities, but we live in details.
...the only simplicity to be trusted is the simplicity to be found on the far side of complexity.
Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.
From the very beginning of his education, the child should experience the joy of discovery.
The art of progress is to reserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order.
Every really new idea looks crazy at first.
The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.
Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.
Great dreamers' dreams are never fulfilled, they are always transcended.
Error is the price we pay for progress.
There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.
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.
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.
All of Western philosophy is but a footnote to Plato.
Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.
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.
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.
The "silly" question is the first intimation of some totally new development
A science that hesitates to forget its founders is lost.
Nobody has a right to speak more clearly than he thinks.
We think in generalities, but we live in detail.
Life is complex in its expression, involving more than percipience, namely desire, emotion, will, and feeling.
Apart from blunt truth, our lives sink decadently amid the perfume of hints and suggestions.
In the conditions of modern life the rule is absolute, the race which does not value trained intelligence is doomed.
Nature is probably quite indifferent to the aesthetic preferences of mathematicians.
It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression.
