Man can acquire accomplishments or he can become an animal, whichever he wants. God makes the animals, man makes himself.
Alfred North Whitehead
Periods of tranquility are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.
Alfred North Whitehead
Ideas won’t keep; something must be done about them.
Alfred North Whitehead
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.
Alfred North Whitehead
Without adventure civilization is in full decay.
Alfred North Whitehead
Common sense is genius in homespun.
Alfred North Whitehead
An enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words.
Alfred North Whitehead
Familiar things happen, and mankind does not bother about them. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.
Alfred North Whitehead
Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning.
Alfred North Whitehead
Philosophy is the product of wonder.
Alfred North Whitehead
Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct form ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.
Alfred North Whitehead
Seek simplicity but distrust it.
Alfred North Whitehead
Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language.
Alfred North Whitehead
The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.
Alfred North Whitehead
Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.
Alfred North Whitehead
Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.
Alfred North Whitehead
Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure.
Alfred North Whitehead
It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious.
Alfred North Whitehead
Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas.
Alfred North Whitehead
It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.
Alfred North Whitehead
The silly question is the first intimation of some totally new development.
Alfred North Whitehead
It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression.
Alfred North Whitehead
Almost all new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.
Alfred North Whitehead
Fools act on imagination without knowledge, pedants act on knowledge without imagination.
Alfred North Whitehead
The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.
Alfred North Whitehead
The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, seek simplicity and distrust it.
Alfred North Whitehead
The absolute pacifist is a bad citizen; times come when force must be used to uphold right, justice and ideals. Alfred North Whitehead
I have always noticed that deeply and truly religious persons are fond of a joke, and I am suspicious of those who aren’t.
Alfred North Whitehead
There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays to the devil. Alfred North Whitehead
Knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows. Alfred North Whitehead Wisdom, Knowledge, Grows 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.
Alfred North Whitehead