Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

Man can acquire accomplishments or he can become an animal, whichever he wants. God makes the animals, man makes himself.

I am not God, but I am my creator.

God and Nature first made us what we are, and then out of our own created genius we make ourselves what we want to be. Follow always that great law. Let the sky and God be our limit and Eternity our measurement.

You were not born a winner, and you were not born a loser. You are what you make yourself be.

The Great Work is, before all things, the creation of man by himself, that is to say, the full and entire conquest of his faculties and his future; it is especially the perfect emancipation of his will.

You make yourself what you are. You have control of your own destiny.

Nothing save divine power is capable of doing so much for man as he can for himself.

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.

Man is a universe within himself.

Everything in the world can be changed, my dear Florestan, but the human being.

The strongest principle of growth lies in the human choice.

God gave us our agency. He taught us a way. He showed us what to do. But he gave us our agency and left us free to act as we choose to do.

Humans have a light side and a dark side, and it's up to us to choose which way we're going to live our lives. Even if you start out on the dark side, it doesn't mean you have to continue your journey that way. You always have time to turn it around.

I think people, for the most part, actually want what they think is best.

Man is made or unmade by himself. By the right choice he ascends. As a being of power, intelligence, and love, and the lord of his own thoughts, he holds the key to every situation.

Science of mind teaches you how to realize how much control you have over your own life. It teaches you that we have the ability to change our lives at any point we choose.

Life consists not simply in what heredity and environment do to us but in what we make out of what they do to us.

A man, as a general rule, owes very little to what he is born with - a man is what he makes of himself.

One's only rival is one's own potentialities. One's only failure is failing to live up to one's own possibilities. In this sense, every man can be a king, and must therefore be treated like a king.

One creates oneself.

It is not God's will merely that we should be happy, but that we should make ourselves happy.

Man is born a tabula rasa; he must learn how to choose the ends that are proper for him and the means that he must adopt to attain them. All this must be done by his reason.

You cannot force somebody to be a different person.

I am glad I am born in this era, but, at the same time, my success will totally depend on the choices I make.

Man is improvable. Some people think he is only a machine, and that the only difference between a man and a mill is, that one is carried by blood and the other by water.