412 Quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

The ultimate metaphysical ground is the creative advance into novelty.

The preternatural solemnity of a good many of the professionally religious is to me a point against them.

In modern times the belief that the ultimate explanation of all things was to be found in Newtonian mechanics was an adumbration of the truth that all science, as it grows towards perfection, becomes mathematical in its ideas.

Spoken language is merely a series of squeaks.

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.

I am sure that one secret of a successful teacher is that he has formulated quite clearly in his mind what the pupil has got to know in precise fashion. He will then cease from half-hearted attempts to worry his pupils with memorizing a lot of irrelevant stuff of inferior importance.

Not a sentence or a word is independent of the circumstances under which it is uttered.

The worst that happened to men of science was that Galileo suffered an honorable detention and a mild reproof, before dying peacefully in his bed.

It is impossible to meditate on time and the mystery of nature without an overwhelming emotion at the limitations of human intelligence.