412 Quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

Knowledge does not keep any better than fish.

In all education the main cause of failure is staleness.

That knowledge which adds greatness to character is knowledge so handled as to transform every phase of immediate experience.

The merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God’s earth.

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order. Life refuses to be embalmed alive. The more prolonged the halt in some unrelieved system of order, the greater the crash of the dead society.

I would be a billionaire if I was looking to be a selfish boss. That’s not me.

Shakespeare wrote better poetry for not knowing too much; Milton, I think, knew too much finally for the good of his poetry.

The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature throughout the centuries is the notion of ‘independent existence.’ There is no such mode of existence; every entity is to be understood in terms of the way it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are cavalry charges in a battle – they are limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.