Alfred North Whitehead

It is the business of the future to be dangerous; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties.

Modern science has imposed on humanity the necessity for wandering. Its progressive thought and its progressive technology make the transition through time, from generation to generation, a true migration into uncharted seas of adventure.

[F]ertilisation of the soul is the reason for the necessity of art.

Sensitiveness without impulse spells decadence, and impulse without sensitiveness spells brutality.

There is something between the gross specialised values of the mere practical man, and the thin specialised values of the mere scholar. Both types have missed something; and if you add together the two sets of values, you do not obtain the …

The power of God is the worship He inspires.[…] The worship of God is not a rule of safety — it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable. The death of religion comes with the repression of the high hope of adventure.

The fact of the religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient …

Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science. Its principles may be eternal, but the expression of those principles requires continual development.

[W]e cannot think first and act afterwards. From the moment of birth we are immersed in action, and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought.

In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of a defeat; but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress towards a victory.

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

It belongs to the self-respect of intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final unravelment.

He has been named respectively, Jehovah, Allah, Brahma, Father in Heaven, Order of Heaven, First Cause, Supreme Being, Chance. Each name corresponds to a system of thought derived from the experiences of those who have used it.

No reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the ground of all rationality.

Often things realised in thought are more vivid than than the same things in inattentive physical experience. But the things apprehended as mental are always subject to the condition that we come to a stop when we come to explore ever …

The ancient world takes its stand upon the drama of the Universe, the modern world upon the inward drama of the Soul.

Every human being is the natural guardian of his own importance.

Epochs do not rise from the dead.… [W]hereas you can make a replica of an ancient statue, there is no possible replica of an ancient state of mind. There can be no nearer approximation than that which a masquerade bears to real life. There …

All science must start with some assumptions as to the ultimate analysis of the facts with which it deals. These assumptions are justified partly by their adherence to the types of occurrence of which we are directly conscious, and partly …

Heaven knows what seeming nonsense may not to-morrow be demonstrated truth.

In the past human life was lived in a bullock cart; in the future it will be lived in an aeroplane; and the change of speed amounts to a difference in quality.

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

The salvation of reality is its obstinate, irreducible, matter-of-fact entities, which are limited to be no other than themselves. Neither science, nor art, nor creative action can tear itself away from obstinate, irreducible, limited …

In a sense, all explanation must end in an ultimate arbitrariness.