Quotes from Alfred North Whitehead

You cannot be wise without some basis of knowledge, but you may easily acquire knowledge and remain bare of wisdom.

Learning preserves the errors of the past, as well as its wisdom. For this reason, dictionaries are public dangers, although they are necessities.

In a sense, knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows: for details are swallowed up in principles.

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 real history does not get written, because it is not in people's brains but in their nerves and vitals.

Civilizations can only be understood by those who are civilized.

Wisdom is the fruit of a balanced development.

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.

What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like, and immorality is what they dislike.

Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains. There have been added, however, some grasp of the immensity of things, some purification of emotion by understanding.

The task of a university is the creation of the future, so far as rational thought and civilized modes of appreciation can affect the issue.

Simple solutions seldom are. It takes a very unusual mind to undertake analysis of the obvious.

By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and in effect increases the mental power of the race.

In every age of well-marked transition, there is the pattern of habitual dumb practice and emotion which is passing and there is oncoming a new complex of habit.

The absolute pacifist is a bad citizen; times come when force must be used to uphold right, justice and ideals.

Now in creative thought common sense is a bad master. Its sole criterion for judgement is that the new ideas shall look like the old ones. In other words it can only work by suppressing originality.

After you understand about the sun and the stars and the rotation of the earth, you may still miss the radiance of the sunset.

There is no greater hindrance to the progress of thought than an attitude of irritated party-spirit.

Familiar things happen, and mankind does not bother about them. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

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

Routine is the god of every social system it is the seventh heaven of business the essential component in the success of every factory the ideal of every statesman.

Every really new idea looks crazy at first.

But you can catch yourself entertaining habitually certain ideas and setting others aside; and that, I think, is where our personal destinies are largely decided.

The foundation of reverence is this perception, that the present holds within itself the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, that whole amplitude of time, which is eternity.