412 Quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

I always feel that I have two duties to perform with a parting guest: one, to see that he doesn’t forget anything that is his; the other, to see that he doesn’t take anything that is mine.

The degeneracy of mankind is distinguished from its uprise by the dominance of chill abstractions, divorced from aesthetic content.

A man of science doesn’t discover in order to know, he wants to know in order to discover.

As soon as high consciousness is reached, the enjoyment of existence is entwined with pain, frustration, loss, tragedy. Amid the passing of so much beauty, so much heroism, so much daring, Peace is then the intuition of permanence. It keeps vivid the sensitiveness to the tragedy; and it sees the fineness beyond the faded level of surrounding fact. Each tragedy is the disclosure of an ideal: What might have been, and was not; What can be. The tragedy was not in vain.

Ideas won’t keep. Something must be done about them.

In so far as your metaphysical beliefs are implicit, you vaguely interpret the past on the lines of the present. But when it comes to the primary metaphysical data, the world of which you are immediately conscious is the whole datum.

Wisdom alone is true ambition’s aim, wisdom is the source of virtue and of fame; obtained with labour, for mankind employed, and then, when most you share it, best enjoyed.

A duration is a concrete slab of nature limited by simultaneity which is an essential factor disclosed in sense-awareness.

When success turns a man’s head he faces failure.