Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

What is the truth? Is it what you experience? Is it what I experience? Or is there some objective truth in between?

Perhaps looking out through big baby eyes - if we could - would not be as revelatory experience as many imagine. We might see a world inhabited by objects and people, a world infused with causation, agency, and morality - a world that would surprise us not by its freshness but by its familiarity.

There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.

The facts are always less than what really happened.

All experience is subjective.

The existence of inherent limits of experience in no way settles the question about the subordination of facts of the human world to our knowledge of matter.

There are three sides to every story: your side, my side, and the truth.

The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not.

We bring about a world in consciousness that is partly what is given, and partly what we bring, something that comes into being through this particular conjunction and no other. And the key to this is the kind of attention we pay to the world.

There is no such thing as a true account of anything.

The need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject

The individual point of view is the only point of view from which one is able to look at the world in its truth.

We can never be quite clear whether we are referring to the world as it is or to the world as we see it.

Facts do not constitute truth.

Is 4 the same 4 for everybody? Are all sevens equal? When the convict ponders the light is it the same light that shines on you?

There are many levels of truth.

Whatever you say it is, it isn't.

From the perspective of mere representation, the external world always remains only a phenomenon.

Because our entire universe is made up of consciousness, we never really experience the universe directly we just experience our consciousness of the universe, our perception of it, so right, our only universe is perception.

Facts are many, but the truth is one.

There are no facts, only interpretations.

The perception of the audience is the interesting part. If the audience doesn't hear what is going on, is it going on or not?

On the other hand, for the whole human being who wills, feels, and represents, external reality is given simultaneously and with as much certitude as his own self.

Life's all about perceptions.

Truth can be stated in a thousand different ways, yet each one can be true.