412 Quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

The whole of mathematics consists in the organization of a series of aids to the imagination in the process of reasoning.

You may not divide the seamless coat of learning,

What we perceive as the present is the vivid fringe of memory tinged with anticipation.

A clash of doctrine is not a disaster, it is an opportunity.

Every intellectual revolution which has ever stirred humanity into greatness has been a passionate protest against inert ideas. Then, alas, with pathetic ignorance of human psychology, it has proceeded by some educational scheme to bind humanity afresh with inert ideas of its own fashioning.

Many a scientist has patiently designed experiments for the purpose of substantiating his belief that animal operations are motivated by no purposes. He has perhaps spent his spare time in writing articles to prove that human beings are as other animals so that 'purpose' is a category irrelevant for the explanation of their bodily activities, his own activities included. Scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study.

A science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost.

Aristotle discovered all the half-truths which were necessary to the creation of science.

Philosophy is the product of wonder. The effort after the general characterization of the world around us is the romance of human thought.