412 Quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

Systems, scientific or 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.

Without deductive logic science would be entirely useless. It is merely a barren game to ascend from the particular to the general, unless afterwards we can reverse the process and descend from the general to the particular, ascending and descending like angels on Jacob's ladder.

It is this union of passionate interest in the detailed facts with equal devotion to abstract generalisation which forms the novelty in our present society .

[In many circumstances,] the most important thing about a proposition is not that it be true, but that it be interesting.

I am also greatly indebted to Bergson, William James, and John Dewey. One of my preoccupations has been to rescue their type of thought from the charge of anti-intellectualism, which rightly or wrongly has been associated with it.

Democracy...is a society in which the unbeliever feels undisturbed and at home. If there were only a half dozen unbelievers in America, their well-being would be a test of our democracy.

Without doubt, if we are to go back to that ultimate, integral experience, unwarped by the sophistications of theory, that experience whose elucidation is the final aim of philosophy, the flux of things is one ultimate generalization around which we must weave our philosophical system.

Great dreamers' dreams are never fulfilled, they are always transcended.

Human nature loses its most precious quality when it is robbed of its sense of things beyond, unexplored and yet insistent.