Alfred North Whitehead: Trending quotes

Alfred North Whitehead trending quotes. Read the latest quotes in collection

Alfred North Whitehead: 224 quotes39 likes

“The power of God is the worship He inspires…. The worship of God is not a rule of safety — it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable. The death of religion comes with the repression of the high hope of adventure.”

Alfred North Whitehead

Source: 1920s, Science and the Modern World (1925), Ch. 12: Religion and Science.

“There is a quality of life which lies always beyond the mere fact of life; and when we include the quality in the fact, there is still omitted the quality of the quality.”

Alfred North Whitehead book Religion in the Making

Religion in the Making (February 1926), Lecture II: "Religion and Dogma".
1920s

“In its solitariness the spirit asks, What, in the way of value, is the attainment of life? And it can find no such value till it has merged its individual claim with that of the objective universe. Religion is world-loyalty.”

Alfred North Whitehead book Religion in the Making

Religion in the Making (February 1926), Lecture II: "Religion and Dogma" http://www.mountainman.com.au/whiteh_2.htm. <br class="br">1920s

“There remains the final reflection, how shallow, puny, and imperfect are efforts to sound the depths in the nature of things. In philosophical discussion, the merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement is an exhibition of folly.”

Alfred North Whitehead

Preface, p. 16 (Corrected Edition)
1920s, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)

“What the learned world tends to offer is one second-hand scrap of information illustrating ideas derived from another second-hand scrap of information. The second-handedness of the learned world is the secret of its mediocrity.”

Alfred North Whitehead

1920s, The Aims of Education (1929)

“The oneness of the universe, and the oneness of each element of the universe, repeat themselves to the crack of doom in the creative advance from creature to creature, each creature including in itself the whole of history and exemplifying the self-identity of things and their mutual diversities.”

Alfred North Whitehead

Pt. III, ch. 1, sec. 7.
1920s, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)

“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

As quoted in Church and Home, Vol. 1 (1964) by United Methodist Church, and Evangelical United Brethren Church, p. 21.
Attributed from posthumous publications

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

Alfred North Whitehead

Source: Attributed from posthumous publications, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954), Ch. 21, June 28, 1941.

“Whether or no it be for the general good, life is robbery. It is at this point that with life morals become acute. The robber requires justification.”

Alfred North Whitehead

1920s, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)

“We do not require elaborate training merely in order to refrain from embarking upon intricate trains of inference. Such abstinence is only too easy.”

Alfred North Whitehead

Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (1927).
1920s

“There is nothing in the real world which is merely an inert fact. Every reality is there for feeling: it promotes feeling; and it is felt.”

Alfred North Whitehead book Process and Reality

Source: 1920s, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929), Chapter IV, p. 310 https://books.google.com/books?id=uJDEx6rPu1QC&pg=PA310.

“It is a safe rule to apply that, when a mathematical or philosophical author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense.”

Alfred North Whitehead

Source: 1910s, An Introduction to Mathematics (1911), ch. 15.