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Quotations
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Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.
-Alfred North Whitehead
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I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning , or destroyed it altogether.
-Alfred North Whitehead
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Simplicity
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Seek simplicity but distrust it.
-Alfred North Whitehead
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Society
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It is the first step in sociological wisdom, to recognize that the major advances in civilisation are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur: like unto an arrow in the hand of a child. The art of free society consists first in the maintenance of the symbolic code; and secondly in fearlessness of revision, to secure that the code serves those purposes which satisfy an enlightened reason. Those societies which cannot combine reverence to their symbols with freedom of revision, must ultimately decay either from anarchy, or from the slow atrophy of a life stifled by useless shadows.
-Alfred North Whitehead, Symbolism, its Meaning and Effect
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Thought
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Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking.
-Alfred North Whitehead
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We think in generalities, but we live in detail.
-Alfred North Whitehead
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Truth
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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.
-Alfred North Whitehead
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Youth
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The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.
-Alfred North Whitehead
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Books by and about Alfred North Whitehead