Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

Information is a lot like water; it's hard to hold on to, and hard to keep from leaking away.

I call Washington 'the city of the perishable.'

Today's news, which may be yesterday's anyway, will be eclipsed tomorrow.

Sentences are like just caught fish. Spunky today, stinky tomorrow.

Our little systems have their day; They have their day and cease to be.

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

Nothing grows old faster than the new.

Careers are here and they're gone. No matter how great we think we are, we're nothing but the temples of Ozymandias-we're ruins in the making.

Apples taste sweetest when they're going.

These flowers will be rotten in a couple hours. Birds will crap on them. The smoke here will make them stink, and tomorrow a bulldozer will probably run over them, but for right now they are so beautiful.

For me, the problem of time is linked up with that of death, with the thought that we inevitably draw closer and closer to it, with the horror of decay.

We spend the early years feeding our brains with information and the latter half trying not to think about it all.

The landscape, like Los Angeles itself, is transitional. Impermanence haunts the city, with its mushroom industries--the aircraft perpetually becoming obsolete, the oil which must one day be exhausted, the movies which fill America's theatres for six months and are forgotten. Many of its houses--especially the grander ones--have a curiously disturbing atmosphere, a kind of psychological dankness which smells of anxiety, overdrafts, uneasy lust, whisky, divorce and lies.

That flesh is but the glasse, which holds the dust That measures all our time; which also shall Be crumbled into dust.

The best ground untilled, soonest runs out into rank weeds. A man of knowledge that is negligent or uncorrected, cannot but grow wild and godless.

Time is that in which all things pass away.

The natural term of an apple-pie is but twelve hours. It reaches its highest state about one hour after it comes from the oven, and just before its natural heat has quite departed. But every hour afterward is a declension. And after it is one day old, it is thence-forward but the ghastly corpse of apple-pie.

Nothing is of a permanent nature.

There is in this world in which everything wears out, everything perishes, one thing that crumbles into dust, that destroys itself still more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself than Beauty: namely Grief.

Whatever begins, also ends.

What is love, if it can calculate and provide against its own decay?

History is a great dust heap.

Dust into Dust, and under Dust to lie, Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and-sans End!