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