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“Our habitual experience is a complex of failure and success in the enterprise of interpretation. If we desire a record of uninterpreted experience, we must ask a stone to record its autobiography.”

Alfred North Whitehead

Pt. I, ch. 1, sec. 6.
1920s, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)

“The deliberate aim at Peace very easily passes into its bastard substitute, Anesthesia.”

Alfred North Whitehead

Source: 1930s, Adventures of Ideas (1933), p. 284.

“The chief danger to philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence.”

Alfred North Whitehead

Pt. V, ch. 1, sec. 1.
1920s, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)

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

Alfred North Whitehead

Source: 1930s, Adventures of Ideas (1933), p. 102.

“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

Source: 1920s, Science and the Modern World (1925), Ch. 13: Requisites for Social Progress.

“That knowledge which adds greatness to character is knowledge so handled as to transform every phase of immediate experience.”

Alfred North Whitehead

1920s, The Aims of Education (1929)

“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. The art of free society consists first in the maintenance of the symbolic code; and secondly in fearlessness of revision, to secure that the code serves those purposes which satisfy an enlightened reason. Those societies which cannot combine reverence to their symbols with freedom of revision, must ultimately decay either from anarchy, or from the slow atrophy of a life stifled by useless shadows.”

Alfred North Whitehead

Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (1927), chapter 3, p. 88; final paragraph of the book.
1920s

“The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention.”

Alfred North Whitehead

Source: 1920s, Science and the Modern World (1925), Ch. 6: "The Nineteenth Century"

“Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilisation of knowledge.”

Alfred North Whitehead

1920s, The Aims of Education (1929)

“Systems, scientific and philosophic, come and go. Each method of limited understanding is at length exhausted. In its prime each system is a triumphant success: in its decay it is an obstructive nuisance.”

Alfred North Whitehead

Source: 1930s, Adventures of Ideas (1933), p. 203.

“A race preserves its vigour so long as it harbours a real contrast between what has been and what may be, and so long as it is nerved by the vigour to adventure beyond the safeties of the past. Without adventure, civilization is in full decay.”

Alfred North Whitehead

Source: 1930s, Adventures of Ideas (1933), p. 360.

“The science of pure mathematics, in its modern developments, may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit.”

Alfred North Whitehead

1920s, Science and the Modern World (1925)

“…The pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit…”

Alfred North Whitehead

Source: 1920s, Science and the Modern World (1925), Ch. 2: "Mathematics as an Element in the History of Thought"

“The worst that happened to men of science was that Galileo suffered an honorable detention and a mild reproof, before dying peacefully in his bed.”

Alfred North Whitehead

Source: 1920s, Science and the Modern World (1925), Ch. 1: "The Origins of Modern Science"

“A general definition of civilization: a civilized society is exhibiting the five qualities of truth, beauty, adventure, art, peace.”

Alfred North Whitehead

Source: 1930s, Adventures of Ideas (1933), p. 353.

“Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science. Its principles may be eternal, but the expression of those principles requires continual development.”

Alfred North Whitehead

1920s, Science and the Modern World (1925)

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

Alfred North Whitehead

1920s, The Aims of Education (1929)

“By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and in effect increases the mental power of the race.”

Alfred North Whitehead

Source: 1910s, An Introduction to Mathematics (1911), ch. 5.

“The chief error in philosophy is overstatement.”

Alfred North Whitehead

Pt. I, ch. 1, sec. 1.
1920s, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)

“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.”

Alfred North Whitehead

Source: Attributed from posthumous publications, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954), Ch. 28, June 3, 1943.