Alfred North Whitehead

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

The ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction.

Creativity is the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact. It is that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively. …

The term many presupposes the term one, and the term one presupposes the term many.

Religion is an ultimate craving to infuse into the insistent particularity of emotion that non-temporal generality which primarily belongs to conceptual thought alone.

The task of philosophy is to recover the totality obscured by the selection.

Consciousness is only the last and greatest of such elements by which the selective character of the individual obscures the external totality from which it originates and which it embodies.

Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity.

Our habitual experience is a complex of failure and success in the enterprise of interpretation. If we desire a record of uninterpreted experience, we must ask a stone to record its autobiography.

Rationalism is an adventure in the clarification of thought.

One side makes process ultimate; the other side makes fact ultimate.

In all philosophic theory there is an ultimate which is actual in virtue of its accidents.

The chief error in philosophy is overstatement.

There remains the final reflection, how shallow, puny, and imperfect are efforts to sound the depths in the nature of things. In philosophical discussion, the merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement is an exhibition …

The main importance of Francis Bacon’s influence does not lie in any peculiar theory of inductive reasoning which he happened to express, but in the revolt against second-hand information of which he was a leader.

What the learned world tends to offer is one second-hand scrap of information illustrating ideas derived from another second-hand scrap of information. The second-handedness of the learned world is the secret of its mediocrity.

Every intellectual revolution which has ever stirred humanity into greatness has been a passionate protest against inert ideas. Then, alas, with pathetic ignorance of human psychology, it has proceeded by some educational scheme to bind …

The justification for a university is that it preserves the connection between knowledge and the zest of life, by uniting the young and the old in the imaginative consideration of learning.

The universities are schools of education, and schools of research.

That knowledge which adds greatness to character is knowledge so handled as to transform every phase of immediate experience.

The essence of education is that it be religious. Pray, what is religious education? A religious education is an education which inculcates duty and reverence.

The consequences of a plethora of half-digested theoretical knowledge are deplorable.

Knowledge does not keep any better than fish.

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