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Alfred North Whitehead
124 quotes
“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 (1861–1947) first seen 1938 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 100; Ch. 12, April 28, 1938.
“Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.”
Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) first seen 1939 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 135; Ch. 17, December 15, 1939.
“Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of human life is to grasp as much as we can out of the infinitude.”
Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) first seen 1941 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ch. 21, June 28, 1941.
“A culture is in its finest flower before it begins to analyze itself.”
Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) first seen 1941 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ch. 22, August 17, 1941.
“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 (1861–1947) first seen 1941 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ch. 22, August 30, 1941.
“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 (1861–1947) first seen 1943 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ch. 28, June 3, 1943.
“Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment in recognition of the pattern.”
Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) first seen 1943 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ch. 29, June 10, 1943.
“A philosopher of imposing stature doesn't think in a vacuum. Even his most abstract ideas are, to some extent, conditioned by what is or is not known in the time when he lives.”
Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) first seen 1943 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ch. 29, June 10, 1943.
“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.”
Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) first seen 1943 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ch. 29, June 10, 1943.
“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 (1861–1947) first seen 1943 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ch. 29, June 10, 1943.
“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 (1861–1947) first seen 1944 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ch. 32, January 13, 1944.
“The English never abolish anything. They put it in cold storage.”
Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) first seen 1945 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ch. 36, January 19, 1945.
“Shakespeare wrote better poetry for not knowing too much; Milton, I think, knew too much finally for the good of his poetry.”
Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) first seen 1947 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ch. 43, November 11, 1947.
“It is the first step in sociological wisdom, to recognize that the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur:—like unto an arrow in the hand of a child. The art of free society consists first in the maintenance of the symbolic code; and secondly in fearlessness of revision, to secure that the code serves those purposes which satisfy an enlightened reason. Those societies which cannot combine reverence to their symbols with freedom of revision, must ultimately decay either from anarchy, or from the slow atrophy of a life stifled by useless shadows.”
Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) first seen 1927 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (1927), chapter 3, p. 88; final paragraph of the book.
“The Reformation was a popular uprising, and for a century and a half drenched Europe in blood. The beginnings of the Scientific movement were confined to a minority among the intellectual elite.… [T]he worst that happened to men of science was that Galileo suffered an honorable detention and a mild reproof, before dying peacefully in his bed. The way in which the persecution of Galileo has been remembered is a tribute to the quiet commencement of the most intimate change in outlook which the human race had yet encountered. Since a babe was born in a manger, it may be doubted whether so great a thing has happened with so little stir.”
Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When you are criticising the philosophy of an epoch, do not chiefly direct your attention to those intellectual positions which its exponents feel it necessary explicitly to defend. There will be some fundamental assumptions which adherents of all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them. With these assumptions a certain limited number of types of philosophic systems are possible, and this group of systems constitutes the philosophy of the epoch.”
Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He has been named respectively, Jehovah, Allah, Brahma, Father in Heaven, Order of Heaven, First Cause, Supreme Being, Chance. Each name corresponds to a system of thought derived from the experiences of those who have used it.Among medieval and modern philosophers, anxious to establish the religious significance of God, an unfortunate habit has prevailed of paying Him metaphysical compliments. He has been conceived as the foundation of the metaphysical situation with its ultimate activity. If this conception be adhered to, there can be no alternative except to discern in Him the origin of all evil as well as of all good. He is then the supreme author of the play, and to Him must therefore be ascribed its shortcomings as well as its success.”
Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the first place for over two centuries religion has been on the defensive, and on a weak defensive.[…] The result of the repetition of this undignified retreat, during many generations, has at last almost entirely destroyed the intellectual authority of religious thinkers. Consider this contrast: when Darwin or Einstein proclaim theories which modify our ideas, it is a triumph for science. We do not go about saying that there is another defeat for science, because its old ideas have been abandoned. We know that another step of scientific insight has been gained.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 (1861–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I now come to the second reason for the modern fading of interest in religion.[…] Religion is the reaction of human nature to its search for God. The presentation of God under the aspect of power awakens every modern instinct of critical reaction. This is fatal; for religion collapses unless its main positions command immediacy of assent. In this respect the old phraseology is at variance with the psychology of modern civilisations. This change in psychology is largely due to science, and is one of the chief ways in which the advance of science has weakened the hold of the old religious forms of expression.”
Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The universities are schools of education, and schools of research. But the primary reason for their existence is not to be found either in the mere knowledge conveyed to the students or in the mere opportunities for research afforded to the members of the faculty. Both these functions could be performed at a cheaper rate, apart from these very expensive institutions. Books are cheap, and the system of apprenticeship is well understood. 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. Yet the chief impetus to the foundation of universities came after that date, and in more recent times has even increased. 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.”
Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In training a child to activity of thought, above all things we must beware of what I will call "inert ideas"—that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilised, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations. In the history of education, the most striking phenomenon is that schools of learning, which at one epoch are alive with a ferment of genius, in a succeeding generation exhibit merely pedantry and routine. The reason is, that they are overladen with inert ideas. Education with inert ideas is not only useless: it is, above all things, harmful—Corruptio optimi, pessima [the corruption of the best is the worst].”
Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In all philosophic theory there is an ultimate which is actual in virtue of its accidents. It is only then capable of characterization through its accidental embodiments, and apart from these accidents is devoid of actuality. In the philosophy of organism this ultimate is termed creativity; and [[God] is its primordial, non-temporal accident. In monistic philosophies, Spinoza's or absolute idealism, this ultimate is God, who is also equivalently termed The Absolute. In such monistic schemes, the ultimate is illegitimately allowed a final, eminent reality, beyond that ascribed to any of its accidents. In this general position the philosophy of organism seems to approximate more to some strains of Indian, or Chinese, thought, than to western Asiatic, or European, thought. One side makes process ultimate; the other side makes fact ultimate.”
Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity. Each actual occasion contributes to the circumstances of its origin additional formative elements deepening its own peculiar individuality. Consciousness is only the last and greatest of such elements by which the selective character of the individual obscures the external totality from which it originates and which it embodies. An actual individual, of such higher grade, has truck with the totality of things by reason of its sheer actuality; but it has attained its individual depth of being by a selective emphasis limited to its own purposes. The task of philosophy is to recover the totality obscured by the selection.”
Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Philosophy finds religion, and modifies it; and conversely religion is among the data of experience which philosophy must weave into its own scheme. Religion is an ultimate craving to infuse into the insistent particularity of emotion that non-temporal generality which primarily belongs to conceptual thought alone. In the higher organisms the differences of tempo between the mere emotions and the conceptual experiences produce a life-tedium, unless this supreme fusion has been effected. The two sides of the organism require a reconciliation in which emotional experiences illustrate a conceptual justification, and conceptual experiences find an emotional illustration.”
Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source