110+ Alfred North Whitehead Quotes On God, Education And Mathematical

Alfred North Whitehead was an English mathematician, logician, and philosopher. He is best known for his work in mathematical logic and the philosophy of science. He was a professor of applied mathematics at the University of London and a co-author of the influential Principia Mathematica. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Alfred North Whitehead on god, education, mathematical.

Top 10 Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

1. If a dog jumps into 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.
2. The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.
3. There are no whole truths: All truths are half-truths.
4. Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.
5. No one who achieves success does so without acknowledging the help of others. The wise and confident acknowledge this help with gratitude.
6. Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.
7. Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.
8. ...the self-satisfied dogmatism with which mankind at each period of its history cherishes the delusion of the finality of existing modes of knowledge.
9. Symbolism is no mere idle fancy or corrupt degeneration: it is inherent in the very texture of human life.
10. From the very beginning of his education, the child should experience the joy of discovery.

Alfred North Whitehead Short Quotes

• We think in generalities, but we live in detail.
• Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language.
• It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.
• Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience.
• Inventive genius requires pleasurable mental activity as a condition for its vigorous exercise
• It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious.
• It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression.
• Thus the negative perception is the triumph of consciousness.
• Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.
• I would be a billionaire if I was looking to be a selfish boss. That's not me.

Alfred North Whitehead Quotes About God

God is in the world, or nowhere, creating continually in us and around us. Insofar as man partakes of this creative process does he partake of the divine, of God, and that participation is his immortality. — Alfred North Whitehead

Apart from God every activity is merely a passing whiff of insignificance. — Alfred North Whitehead

A Unitarian is a person who believes in at most one God. — Alfred North Whitehead

Routine is the god of every social system; it is the seventh heaven of business, the essential component in the success of every factory, the ideal of every statesman. The social machine should run like clockwork. — Alfred North Whitehead

I consider Christian theology to be one of the great disasters of the human race. — 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 worship of God is not a rule of safety - it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable. — Alfred North Whitehead

No reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the ground of rationality. — Alfred North Whitehead

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. — Alfred North Whitehead

The merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth. — Alfred North Whitehead

Alfred North Whitehead Quotes About Education

Algebra is the intellectual instrument which has been created for rendering clear the quantitative aspects of the world. — Alfred North Whitehead

Education should turn out the pupil with something he knows well and something he can do well. — Alfred North Whitehead

The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment. — Alfred North Whitehead

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. — Alfred North Whitehead

The purpose of education is not to fill a vessel but to kindle a flame. — Alfred North Whitehead

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. — Alfred North Whitehead

Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilisation of knowledge. — Alfred North Whitehead

Style, in its finest sense, is the last acquirement of the educated mind; it is also the most useful. It pervades the whole being. — Alfred North Whitehead

A clash of doctrine is not a disaster, it is an opportunity. — Alfred North Whitehead

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. — Alfred North Whitehead

Alfred North Whitehead Quotes About Mathematical

The pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit. — Alfred North Whitehead

Seek simplicity, and distrust it. — Alfred North Whitehead

The science of pure mathematics, in its modern developments, may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit. — Alfred North Whitehead

It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. — Alfred North Whitehead

It is a safe rule to apply that, when a mathematical or philosophical author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense. — Alfred North Whitehead

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. — Alfred North Whitehead

On the ostensible exactitude of certain branches of human knowledge, including mathematics. The exactness is a fake. — Alfred North Whitehead

No Roman ever died in contemplation over a geometrical diagram. — Alfred North Whitehead

By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and in effect increases the mental power of the race. — Alfred North Whitehead

The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment... We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this great science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it. — Alfred North Whitehead

Alfred North Whitehead Quotes About Philosophy

The chief error in philosophy is overstatement. — Alfred North Whitehead

Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning. — Alfred North Whitehead

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. — Alfred North Whitehead

Philosophy is the product of wonder. — Alfred North Whitehead

Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity. — Alfred North Whitehead

Philosophy asks the simple question: What is it all about? — Alfred North Whitehead

Philosophy is the product of wonder. The effort after the general characterization of the world around us is the romance of human thought. — Alfred North Whitehead

The chief danger to philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence. — Alfred North Whitehead

Science repudiates philosophy. In other words, it has never cared to justify its truth or explain its meaning. — Alfred North Whitehead

Alfred North Whitehead Quotes About Logic

In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory. — Alfred North Whitehead

To see what is general in what is particular, and what is permanent in what is transitory, is the aim of scientific thought. — Alfred North Whitehead

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. — Alfred North Whitehead

Alfred North Whitehead Quotes About Life

The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy. — Alfred North Whitehead

In a sense, knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows, for details are swallowed up in principles. The details for knowledge which are important, will be picked up ad hoc in each avocation of life, but the habit of the active utilization of well-understood principles is the final possession of WISDOM. — Alfred North Whitehead

Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of life is to grasp as much as we can out of that infinitude. — Alfred North Whitehead

Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language. — Alfred North Whitehead

Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe. — Alfred North Whitehead

The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, seek simplicity and distrust it. — Alfred North Whitehead

One main factor in the upward trend of animal life has been the power of wandering. — Alfred North Whitehead

The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanation of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be ``Seek simplicity and distrust it.'' — Alfred North Whitehead

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. — Alfred North Whitehead

Apart from blunt truth, our lives sink decadently amid the perfume of hints and suggestions. — Alfred North Whitehead

Alfred North Whitehead Quotes About Civilization

I put forward as a general definition of civilization, that a civilized society is exhibiting the five qualities of Truth, Beauty, Adventure, Art, Peace. — Alfred North Whitehead

Without adventure civilization is in full decay. — Alfred North Whitehead

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them. — Alfred North Whitehead

Civilizations can only be understood by those who are civilized. — Alfred North Whitehead

The task of a university is the creation of the future, so far as rational thought and civilized modes of appreciation can affect the issue. — Alfred North Whitehead

Without adventure civilization is in full decay. ... The great fact [is] that in their day the great achievements of the past were the adventures of the past. — Alfred North Whitehead

A race preserves its vigor so long as it harbors a real contrast between what has been and what may be; and so long as it is nerved by the vigor to adventure beyond the safeties of the past. Without adventure civilization is in full decay. — Alfred North Whitehead

The vigor of civilized societies is preserved by the widespread sense that high aims are worth-while. — Alfred North Whitehead

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking. — Alfred North Whitehead

It must be admitted that there is a degree of instability which is inconsistent with civilization. But, on the whole, the great ages have been unstable ages. — Alfred North Whitehead

Alfred North Whitehead Quotes About Ideas

Every really new idea looks crazy at first. — Alfred North Whitehead

The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervor, live for it, and if need be, die for it. — Alfred North Whitehead

Ideas won't keep, something must be done about them. — Alfred North Whitehead

Almost all new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced. — 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 'silly question' is the first intimation of some totally novel development. — Alfred North Whitehead

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. — Alfred North Whitehead

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. — Alfred North Whitehead

The importance of an individual thinker owes something to chance. For it depends upon the fate of his ideas in the minds of his successors. — Alfred North Whitehead

Some of the finest moral intuitions come to quite humble people. The visiting of lofty ideas doesn't depend on formal schooling. — Alfred North Whitehead

Alfred North Whitehead Quotes About Society

Vigorous societies harbor a certain extravagance of objectives, so that men wander beyond the safe provision of personal gratifications. — Alfred North Whitehead

Vigorous societies harbour a certain extravagance of objectives. — Alfred North Whitehead

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. — Alfred North Whitehead

The fixed person for the fixed duties who in older societies was such a godsend, in future will be a public danger. — Alfred North Whitehead

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order. Life refuses to be embalmed alive. The more prolonged the halt in some unrelieved system of order, the greater the crash of the dead society. — Alfred North Whitehead

It is the business of future to be dangerous.... The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur. — Alfred North Whitehead

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. — Alfred North Whitehead

As society is now constituted, a literal adherence to the moral precepts scattered throughout the Gospels would mean sudden death. — Alfred North Whitehead

It is this union of passionate interest in the detailed facts with equal devotion to abstract generalisation which forms the novelty in our present society . — Alfred North Whitehead

A great society is a society in which its men of business think greatly of their functions. — Alfred North Whitehead

Alfred North Whitehead Quotes About Virtue

True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes, but the firm resolve of virtue and reason. — Alfred North Whitehead

Wisdom alone is true ambition's aim, wisdom is the source of virtue and of fame; obtained with labour, for mankind employed, and then, when most you share it, best enjoyed. — Alfred North Whitehead

True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes. Rather the firm resolve of virtue and reason. — Alfred North Whitehead

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. — Alfred North Whitehead

Alfred North Whitehead Famous Quotes And Sayings

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 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. — Alfred North Whitehead

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern. — Alfred North Whitehead

Ninety percent of our lives is governed by emotion. Our brains merely register and act upon what is telegraphed to them by our bodily experience. Intellect is to emotion as our clothes are to our bodies; we could not very well have civilized life without clothes, but we would be in a poor way if we had only clothes without bodies. — Alfred North Whitehead

It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. — Alfred North Whitehead

The absolute pacifist is a bad citizen; times come when force must be used to uphold right, justice and ideals. — Alfred North Whitehead

Seek simplicity but distrust it. — Alfred North Whitehead

The vastest knowledge of today cannot transcend the buddhi of the Rishis in ancient India; and science in its most advanced stage now is closer to Vedanta than ever before. — Alfred North Whitehead

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. — Alfred North Whitehead

Rationalism is an adventure in the clarification of thought. — Alfred North Whitehead

Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it. — Alfred North Whitehead

Human nature loses its most precious quality when it is robbed of its sense of things beyond, unexplored and yet insistent. — Alfred North Whitehead

Common sense is genius in homespun. — Alfred North Whitehead

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. — Alfred North Whitehead

The oneness of the universe, and the oneness of each element of the universe, repeat themselves to the crack of doom in the creative advance from creature to creature, each creature including in itself the whole of history and exemplifying the self-identity of things and their mutual diversities. — Alfred North Whitehead

Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct form ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended. — 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

Algebra reverses the relative importance of the factors in ordinary language. — Alfred North Whitehead

An enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words. — Alfred North Whitehead

Fertilization of the soul is the reason for the necessity of art. — Alfred North Whitehead

Spoken language is merely a series of squeaks. — Alfred North Whitehead

After you understand about the sun and the stars and the rotation of the earth, you may still miss the radiance of the sunset. — Alfred North Whitehead

Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions. — Alfred North Whitehead

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. — Alfred North Whitehead

There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays to the devil. — Alfred North Whitehead

A science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost. — Alfred North Whitehead

You think the world is what it looks like in fine weather at noon day; I think it is what it seems like in the early morning when one first wakes from deep sleep. — Alfred North Whitehead

Dogmatism is the anti-Christ of learning. — Alfred North Whitehead

No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it. — Alfred North Whitehead

Nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent, the nightingale for its song; and the sun for its radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves and should turn them into odes of self congratulation on the excellence of the human mind. — Alfred North Whitehead

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. — Alfred North Whitehead

An open mind is all very well in its way, but it ought not to be so open that there is no keeping anything in or out of it. — Alfred North Whitehead

Scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study. — Alfred North Whitehead

The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature. — Alfred North Whitehead

The real history does not get written, because it is not in people's brains but in their nerves and vitals. — Alfred North Whitehead

But harmony is limitation. Thus rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality. Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing. — Alfred North Whitehead

Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure. — Alfred North Whitehead

The only justification in the use of force is to reduce the amount of force necessary to be used. — Alfred North Whitehead

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. — Alfred North Whitehead

The English never abolish anything. They put it in cold storage. — Alfred North Whitehead

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. — Alfred North Whitehead

Knowledge is always accompanied with accessories of emotion and purpose. — Alfred North Whitehead

Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure, a sense of nothing having been done before, of complete freedom to experiment. — Alfred North Whitehead

Life Lessons by Alfred North Whitehead

1. Alfred North Whitehead teaches us to stay curious and to never stop learning. He believed that knowledge should be pursued for its own sake, and that it was important to question assumptions and think critically.
2. He also taught us to be open-minded and to consider different perspectives. He argued that knowledge should be seen as a continuous process of discovery and exploration.
3. Finally, Whitehead taught us to embrace complexity and to recognize that there are often multiple solutions to a problem. He argued that life is full of complexities and that it is important to approach them with an open mind.