Quotes from Alfred North Whitehead

Apart from God every activity is merely a passing whiff of insignificance.

A Unitarian is a person who believes in at most one God.

The worship of God is not a rule of safety - it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable.

Religion is the reaction of human nature to its search for God.

No reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the ground of rationality.

The preternatural solemnity of a good many of the professionally religious is to me a point against them.

It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression.

The tragedy of the world is that those who are imaginative have but slight experience, and those who are experienced have feeble imaginations.

Imagination is not to be divorced from the facts. It is a way of illuminating the facts.

Education should turn out the pupil with something he knows well and something he can do well.

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

The only justification in the use of force is to reduce the amount of force necessary to be used.

The race that does not value trained intelligence is doomed.

Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.

...the self-satisfied dogmatism with which mankind at each period of its history cherishes the delusion of the finality of existing modes of knowledge.

Knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows.

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.

We cannot think first and act afterward. From the moment of birth we are immersed in action, and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought.

Inventive genius requires pleasurable mental activity as a condition for its vigorous exercise

Common sense is genius in homespun.

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.

All practical teachers know that education is a patient process of mastery of details, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day.

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.

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.