Alfred North Whitehead

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

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

“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.”

“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 duty...”

“Education with inert ideas is not only useless; it is above all things harmful.”

“The antithesis between a technical and a liberal education is fallacious. There can be no adequate technical education which is not liberal, and no liberal education which is not technical.”

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

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

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

“Fools act on imagination without knowledge, pedants act on knowledge without imagination.”

“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.”

“Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the universe.”

“It takes a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.”

“We think in generalities, but we live in detail.”

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

“It is the business of the future to be dangerous.”

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

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

“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.”