Quotes from Alfred North Whitehead

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

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.

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.

There is a tradition of opposition between adherents of induction and of deduction. In my view it would be just as sensible for the two ends of a worm to quarrel.

It is the business of the future to be dangerous and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties.

Symbolism is no mere idle fancy or corrupt degeneration: it is inherent in the very texture of human life.

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.

Almost all new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.

Vigorous societies harbour a certain extravagance of objectives.

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

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

Life is complex in its expression, involving more than percipience, namely desire, emotion, will, and feeling.

Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas.

No one who achieves success does so without acknowledging the help of others. The wise and confident acknowledge this help with gratitude.

We must produce a great age, or see the collapse of the upward striving of our race.

Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.

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

There is only one subject matter for education, and that is Life in all its manifestations

One main factor in the upward trend of animal life has been the power of wandering.

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.

Our habitual experience is a complex of failure and success in the enterprise of interpretation. If we desire a record of uninterpreted experience, we must ask a stone to record its autobiography.

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.

Life is the enjoyment of emotion, derived from the past and aimed at the future.

There is a quality of life which lies always beyond the mere fact of life; and when we include the quality in the fact, there is still omitted the quality of the quality.