Quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.

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.

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

Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language.

Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.

Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct form ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.

It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious.

Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.

No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it.

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

In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory.

If a dog jumps into your lap, it is because he is fond of you; but if a cat does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer.

True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes, but the firm resolve of virtue and reason.

Fools act on imagination without knowledge, pedants act on knowledge without imagination.

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.

Knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows.

Wisdom alone is true ambitions aim, wisdom is the source of virtue and of fame; obtained with labour, for mankind employed, and then, when most you share it, best enjoyed.

The task of a university is the creation of the future, so far as rational thought and civilized modes of appreciation can affect the issue.

“There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.”

“Religion carries two sorts of people in two entirely opposite directions: the mild and gentle people it carries towards mercy and justice; the persecuting people it carries into fiendish sadistic cruelty. Mind you, though this may seem to justify the eighteenth-century Age of Reason in its contention that religion is nothing but an organized, gigantic fraud and a curse to the human race, nothing could be farther from the truth. It possesses these two aspects, the evil one of the two appealing to people capable of naïve hatred; but what is actually happening is that when you get natures stirred to their depths over questions which they feel to be overwhelmingly vital, you get the bad stirred up in them as well as the good; the mud as well as the water. It doesnt seem to matter much which sect you have, for both types occur in all sects....”