Alfred North Whitehead

The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them.

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

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.

Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it. A merely well informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth.

Seek simplicity, and distrust it.

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 future belongs to those who can rise above the confines of the earth.

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

Wisdom alone is true ambition's aimWisdom the source of virtue, and of fame,Obtained with labor, for mankind employed,And then, when most you share it, best enjoyed.

If a dog jumps in your lap, it is because he is fond of you; but if a cat does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer.

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change.

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

It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

An enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words.

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.

The only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present. The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground; for it is the past, and it is the future.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

The poet, the artist, the sleuth - whoever sharpens our perception tends to be antisocial... he cannot go along with currents and trends.

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.

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

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

A clash of doctrines is not a disaster--it is an opportunity.