Alfred North Whitehead

“What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like.”

“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”

“Seek simplicity, and distrust it.”

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

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

“A science that hesitates to forget its founders is lost.”

“Knowledge does not keep any better than fish.”

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

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

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

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

“Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilisation of knowledge.”

“The function of Reason is to promote the art of life.”

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

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

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

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

“The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention.”