Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

The very essence of rationalism is that it assumes that the reason is the highest faculty in man and the lord of all the rest.

The basic drive behind real philosophy is curiosity about the world, not interest in the writings of philosophers.

If the ability to tell right from wrong should turn out to have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to "demand" its exercise from every sane person, no matter how erudite or ignorant, intelligent or stupid, he may happen to be. Kant in this respect almost alone among the philosophers was much bothered by the common opinion that philosophy is only for the few, precisely because of its moral implications.

Science is much closer to myth than a scientific philosophy is prepared to admit. It is one of the many forms of thought that have been developed by man, and not necessarily the best. It is conspicuous, noisy, and impudent, but it is inherently superior only for those who have already decided in favour of a certain ideology, or who have accepted it without ever having examined its advantages and its limits.

If you don't generalize you don't philosophize.

We do not know a truth without knowing its cause.

Pythagoras, Locke, Socrates - but pages might be filled up, as vainly as before, with the sad usage of all sorts of sages, who in his life-time, each was deemed a bore! The loftiest minds outrun their tardy ages.

Reason in my philosophy is only a harmony among irrational impulses.

Poetry and philosophy will become friends.

A logical picture of facts is a thought.

The whole life of a philosopher is the meditation of his death.

But Aristotle's philosophy was the intellect's Declaration of Independence.

It is easy to build a philosophy - it doesn't have to run

Seeing that the Senses cannot decide our dispute, being themselves full of uncertainty, we must have recourse to Reason; there is no reason but must be built upon another reason: so here we are retreating backwards to infinity.

I am the East. I have philosophies, I have religions, who would exchange them for airplanes?

Simple perception then is a fallacy. Besides the conscious prejudices that we are aware of imposing on the world, there are a thousand subconscious prejudices that we assume to be actuality.

It is among men of genius and science that atheism alone is found.

Only the most perfect human being can design the most perfect philosophy.

I do not need the musing of the philosophers to tell me what I am doing. It would be more interesting to let me know why I am doing it.

Philosophy still moves too much straight ahead, and is not yet cyclical enough.

The philosophy of reasoning, to be complete, ought to comprise the theory of bad as well as of good reasoning.

Philosophy is the thoughts of men about human thinking, reasoning and imagining, and the real values in human existence.

Philosophy is the rational expression of genius.

Assumptions are the things we don't know we're making.

One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons-that's philosophy. People believe in God because they've been conditioned to believe in God.