412 Quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

The invention of the differential calculus marks a crisis in the history of mathematics. The progress of science is divided between periods characterized by a slow accumulation of ideas and periods, when, owing to the new material for thought thus patiently collected, some genius by the invention of a new method or a new point of view, suddenly transforms the whole subject on to a higher level.

Let us grant that the pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit, a refuge from the goading urgency of contingent happenings.

Our habitual experience is a complex of failure and success in the enterprise of interpretation. If we desire a record of uninterpreted experience, we must ask a stone to record its autobiography.

Let us grant that the pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit, a refuge from the groading urgency of contingent happenings.

I think that our power of conscious origination is where free will comes in...We are originally choosing between the good and the less good, whether aware of it or not.

The factor in human life provocative of a noble discontent is the gradual emergence of a sense of criticism, founded upon appreciation of beauty. and of intellectual distinction, and of beauty.

In formal logic, a contradiction is a signal of defeat: but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory.