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| Alfred North Whitehead
A clash of doctrines is not a disaster--it is an opportunity. A man of science doesn't discover in order to know, he wants to know in
order to discover.Almost all new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.An enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words.Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern. 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.Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.Civilizations can only be understood by those who are civilized.Common sense is genius in homespun.Education which is not modern share the fate of all organic things which are kept too long.Education with inert ideas is not only useless; it is above all things harmful.Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning.Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.Familiar things happen, and mankind does not bother about them. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious. Few, if any, survive their teens.Fools act on imagination without knowledge, pedants act on knowledge without imagination.Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas.Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.I have always noticed that deeply and truly religious persons are fond of a joke, and I am suspicious of those who aren't.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. I would be a billionaire if I was looking to be a selfish boss. That's not me. Ideas won't keep; something must be done about themIf 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. If a dog jumps into 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. In every age of well-marked transition, there is the pattern of habitual dumb practice and emotion which is passing and there is oncoming a new complex of habit. In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory.In order to acquire learning, we must first shake ourselves free of it.In the conditions of modern life the rule is absolute, the race which does not value trained intelligence is doomed.Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct form ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.Inventive genius requires pleasurable mental activity as a condition for its vigorous exercise.It is the business of the future to be dangerous.It must be admitted that there is a degree of instability which is inconsistent with civilization. But, on the whole, the great ages have been unstable ones.It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.Knowledge is always accompanied with accessories of emotion and purpose.Knowledge keeps no better than fish.Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.Life is the enjoyment of emotion, derived from the past and aimed at the future.Necessity is the mother of invention is a silly proverb. Necessity is the mother of futile dodges is much nearer the truth. Nobody has a right to speak more clearly than he thinks.Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance is the death of knowledge.One main factor in the upward trend of animal life has been the power of wandering.Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of life is to grasp as much as we can out of that infinitude.Periods of tranquility are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.Philosophy is the product of wonder.Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness.Seek simplicity but distrust it.Simple solutions seldom are. It takes a very unusual mind to undertake analysis of the obvious. Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language.Spoken language is merely a series of squeaks.The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order. The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order. Life refuses to be embalmed alive. The more prolonged the halt in some unrelieved system of order, the greater the crash of the dead society.The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.The learned tradition is not concerned with truth, but with the learned adjustment of learned statements of antecedent learned people.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.The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervor, live for it, and if need be, die for it.There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes, but the firm resolve of virtue and reason.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. We must produce a great age, or see the collapse of the upward striving of our race.We think in generalities, but we live in detail.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.Wisdom alone is true ambition's aim,
Wisdom the source of virtue, and of fame,
Obtained with labor, for mankind employed,
And then, when most you share it, best enjoyed.With God he maintains very suspicious relations. They are like two
bears in one den.Without adventure civilization is in full decay. |
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