Alfred North Whitehead Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. Religion carries two sorts of people in two entirely opposite directions: the mild and gentle people it carries towards mercy and justice; the persecuting people it carries into fiendish sadistic cruelty. Mind you, though this may seem to justify the eighteenth-century Age of Reason in its contention that religion is nothing but an organized, gigantic fraud and a curse to the human race, nothing could be farther from the truth. It possesses these two aspects, the evil one of the two appealing to people capable of naïve hatred; but what is actually happening is that when you get natures stirred to their depths over questions which they feel to be overwhelmingly vital, you get the bad stirred up in them as well as the good; the mud as well as the water. It doesn't seem to matter much which sect you have, for both types occur in all sects.... Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead

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

3. A science that hesitates to forget its founders is lost.

4. In the conditions of modern life the rule is absolute, the race which does not value trained intelligence is doomed.

5. Philosophy begins in wonder. And at the end when philosophic thought has done its best the wonder remains.

6. The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, 'Seek simplicity and distrust it. The Concept of Nature: The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, 11/1919

7. The ideas of Freud were popularized by people who only imperfectly understood them, who were incapable of the great effort required to grasp them in their relationship to larger truths, and who therefore assigned to them a prominence out of all proportion to their true importance.

8. The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology

9. The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment... We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this great science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it. An Introduction to Mathematics