Quotes from Alfred North Whitehead

The degeneracy of mankind is distinguished from its uprise by the dominance of chill abstractions, divorced from aesthetic content.

Change' is the description of the adventures of eternal objects in the evolving universe of actual things.

We think in generalities, but we live in detail.

Philosophers can never hope finally to formulate these metaphysical first principles. Weakness of insight and deficiencies of language stand in the way inexorably. Words and phrases must be stretched towards a generality foreign to their ordinary usage; and however such elements of language be stabilized as technicalities, they remain metaphors mutely appealing for an imaginative leap.

Russell is a Platonic dialogue in himself.

Science only deals with half the evidence provided by human experience. It divides the seamless coat — or, to change the metaphor into a happier form, it examines the coat, which is superficial, and neglects the body which is fundamental.

Philosophy is an attempt to express the infinity of the universe in terms of the limitations of language.

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.

God is the unlimited conceptual realization of the absolute wealth of potentiality.

As soon as high consciousness is reached, the enjoyment of existence is entwined with pain, frustration, loss, tragedy. Amid the passing of so much beauty, so much heroism, so much daring, Peace is then the intuition of permanence. It keeps vivid the sensitiveness to the tragedy; and it sees the fineness beyond the faded level of surrounding fact. Each tragedy is the disclosure of an ideal: What might have been, and was not; What can be. The tragedy was not in vain.

From the moment of birth we are immersed in action, and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought.

it is presupposed that no entity can be conceived in complete abstraction from the system of the universe, and that it is the business of speculative philosophy to exhibit this truth. This character is its coherence.

The mountain endures. But when after ages it has worn away, it has gone. If a replica arises, it is yet a new mountain. A colour is eternal. It haunts time like a spirit. It comes and it goes. But where it comes, it is the same colour. It neither survives nor does it live.

Kecerdasan adalah kecepatan untuk memahami segala sesuatu, sedangkan kemampuan adalah kesanggupan untuk bertindak bijaksana dalam menghadapi segala sesuatu.

Without adventure, civilization is in full decay.

Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them.

Art should aim at the production of individuality in the component details of its compositions.

Faraday was asked: "What is the use of this discovery?" He answered: "What is the use of a child - it grows to be a man.

Everything of importance has already been seen by someone who did not discover it.

Life is an offensive directed against the repetitious mechanism of the universe.

That knowledge which adds greatness to character is knowledge so handled as to transform every phase of immediate experience.

Science is a river with two sources, the practical source and the theoretical source.

The certainty of mathematics depends on its complete abstract generality.

There are deeper types of symbolism, in a sense artificial, and yet such that we could not get on without them. Language, written or spoken, is such a symbolism.