412 Quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

Life is complex in its expression, involving more than percipience, namely desire, emotion, will, and feeling.

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

Rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality.Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing. The limitation, and the basis arising from what is already actual, are both of them necessary and interconnected.

My criticism of Hegel procedure is that when in his discussion he arrives at a contradiction, he construes it as a crisis in the universe.

The purpose of thinking is to let the ideas die instead of us dying.

Thus nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent: the nightingale for his song: the sun for its radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves, and should turn them into odes of self-congratulation on the excellency of the human mind. Nature is a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless...

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

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.

Religion is what an individual does with his solitariness.