Alfred North Whitehead

Simple solutions seldom are. It takes a very unusual mind to undertake analysis of the obvious.

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.

We think in generalities, but we live in detail.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

Common sense is genius in homespun.

But you can catch yourself entertaining habitually certain ideas and setting others aside; and that, I think, is where our personal destinies are largely decided.

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

Familiar things happen, and mankind does not bother about them. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

Philosophy is the product of wonder.

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

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

Seek simplicity but distrust it.

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

Civilizations can only be understood by those who are civilized.

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.

Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure.

It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious.

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

It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

The silly question is the first intimation of some totally new development.

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

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

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

The absolute pacifist is a bad citizen; times come when force must be used to uphold right, justice and ideals.

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays to the devil.

The task of a university is the creation of the future, so far as rational thought and civilized modes of appreciation can affect the issue.

I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning, or destroyed it altogether.

Periods of tranquility are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.

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

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

Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.

Without adventure civilization is in full decay.

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.

The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.

Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.

True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes, but the firm resolve of virtue and reason.

Ideas won't keep; something must be done about them.

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.

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

Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.

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

I have always noticed that deeply and truly religious persons are fond of a joke, and I am suspicious of those who aren't.

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.

Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of life is to grasp as much as we can out of that infinitude.

Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.

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.

It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression.

Speak out in acts; the time for words has passed, and only deeds will suffice.

When you're average, you're just as close to the bottom as you are the top.