Quotes from Alfred North Whitehead

A civilized society is one that exhibits the five qualities of truth, beauty, adventure, art and peace.

It is not paradox to say that in our most theoretical moods we may be nearest to our most practical applications

Order is not sufficient. What is required, is something much more complex. It is order entering upon novelty; so that the massiveness of order does not degenerate into mere repetition; and so that the novelty is always reflected upon a background of system.

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

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.

The deliberate aim at Peace very easily passes into its bastard substitute, Anesthesia.

A general definition of civilization: a civilized society is exhibiting the five qualities of truth, beauty, adventure, art, peace.

Fools act on imagination without knowledge, pedants act on knowledge without imagination.

Apart from God every activity is merely a passing whiff of insignificance.

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.

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

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.

Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language.

The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention.

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.

The religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience.

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

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.

It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious.

A culture is in its finest flower before it begins to analyze itself.

An enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words.

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.

In the real world, it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.

Learning preserves the errors of the past, as well as its wisdom. For this reason, dictionaries are public dangers, although they are necessities.