An enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words. - Alfred North Whitehead
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
It takes a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious. - Alfred North Whitehead
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
Wisdom alone is true ambition's aim Wisdom the source of virtue, and of fame, Obtained with labor, for mankind employed, And then, when most you share it, best enjoyed. - Alfred North Whitehead
The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy. - Alfred North Whitehead
Get your knowledge quickly and then use it. If you can use it you will retain it. - Alfred North Whitehead
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
It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious. - 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. - Alfred North Whitehead
The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them. - Alfred North Whitehead
We think in generalities, but we live in detail. - Alfred North Whitehead
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
In the conditions of modern life the rule is absolute, the race which does not value trained intelligence is doomed. - Alfred North Whitehead
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
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
The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order. - Alfred North Whitehead
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
Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern. - Alfred North Whitehead
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
Life is complex in its expression, involving more than percipience, namely desire, emotion, will, and feeling. - Alfred North Whitehead
The art of progress is to preserve order amid change. - Alfred North Whitehead
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
The poet, the artist, the sleuth - whoever sharpens our perception tends to be antisocial... he cannot go along with currents and trends. - Alfred North Whitehead
Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. - Alfred North Whitehead
A clash of doctrines is not a disaster--it is an opportunity. - Alfred North Whitehead
Religion is what an individual does with his solitariness. - Alfred North Whitehead
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
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
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
The future belongs to those who can rise above the confines of the earth. - Alfred North Whitehead
Seek simplicity, and distrust it. - Alfred North Whitehead
Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it. - Alfred North Whitehead
Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them. - Alfred North Whitehead
Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge. - Alfred North Whitehead
Ideas won't keep; something must be done about them. - Alfred North Whitehead
Philosophy begins in wonder. And at the end when philosophic thought has done its best the wonder remains. - Alfred North Whitehead