Quotes from Alfred North Whitehead

Thus nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent: the nightingale for his song: 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 excellency of the human mind. Nature is a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless...

Christianity is the mother of science.

of the limited perspective always includes some additional factors of the background. The entity is then experienced in a wider finite perspective, still presupposing the inevitable background which is the universe in its relation to that entity.

Explicitly in the verbal sentence, or implicitly in the understanding of the subject entertaining it, every expression of a proposition includes demonstrative elements. In fact each word, and each symbolic phrase, is such an element, exciting the conscious prehension of some entity belonging to one of the categories of existence.

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.

In its use of this method natural science has shown a curious mixture of rationalism and irrationalism. Its prevalent tone of thought has been ardently rationalistic within its own borders, and dogmatically irrational beyond those borders. In practice such an attitude tends to become a dog- matic denial that there are any factors in the world not fully expressible in terms of its own primary notions devoid of further generalization. Such a denial is the self-denial of thought.

It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious.

Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science.

Religion is what a person does in his solitariness.

Religion is what a man does with his solitariness.

No religion can be considered in abstraction from its followers, or even from its various types of followers.

Religion increasingly is tending to degenerate into a decent formula wherewith to embellish a comfortable life.

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

Religion is what an individual does with his solitariness.

Knowledge keeps no better than fish.

The only use of knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present.

The consequences of a plethora of half-digested theoretical knowledge are deplorable.

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

Dogmatism is the anti-Christ of learning.

Learning preserves the errors of the past as well as its wisdom.

In order to acquire learning, we must first shake ourselves free of it.

The world is shocked, or amused, by the sight of saintly old people hindering in the name of morality the removal of obvious brutalities from a legal system.

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.

Seek simplicity, and distrust it.