Quotes from Alfred North Whitehead

There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays to the devil.

Apart from blunt truth, our lives sink decadently amid the perfume of hints and suggestions.

The learned tradition is not concerned with truth, but with the learned adjustment of learned statements of antecedent learned people.

Science repudiates philosophy. In other words, it has never cared to justify its truth or explain its meaning.

Heaven knows what seeming nonsense may not tomorrow be demonstrated truth.

There are no whole truths. All truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.

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

Every organism requires an environment of friends, partly to shield it from violent changes, and partly to supply it with its wants.

From the moment of birth we are immersed in action, and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought.

A civilized society is one that exhibits the five qualities of truth, beauty, adventure, art and peace.

A race preserves its vigour so long as it harbours a real contrast between what has been and what may be, and so long as it is nerved by the vigour to adventure beyond the safeties of the past. Without adventure, civilization is in full decay.

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

True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes, but the firm resolve of virtue and reason.

God is in the world, or nowhere, creating continually in us and around us. Insofar as man partakes of this creative process does he partake of the divine, of God, and that participation is his immortality ....

The total absence of humour from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.

No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it.

Some of the finest moral intuitions come to quite humble people. The visiting of lofty ideas doesn't depend on formal schooling. Think of those Galilean peasants.

The major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur.

The total absence of humour in the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.

The only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present.

How the past perishes is how the future becomes.

The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground; for it is the past, and it is the future.

The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.

Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.