Alfred North Whitehead Quotes: 13

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

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

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

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

• Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

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

• The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment... We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this great science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it.

  An Introduction to Mathematics

• The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, 'Seek simplicity and distrust it.

  The Concept of Nature: The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, 11/1919

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

  Process and Reality

• The ideas of Freud were popularized by people who only imperfectly understood them, who were incapable of the great effort required to grasp them in their relationship to larger truths, and who therefore assigned to them a prominence out of all proportion to their true importance.

• All of Western philosophy is but a footnote to Plato.

• The foundation of reverence is this perception, that the present holds within itself the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, that whole amplitude of time, which is eternity.

• In the conditions of modern life the rule is absolute, the race which does not value trained intelligence is doomed.