Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

Those we call the ancients were really new in everything.

In modern Western culture, the new is considered better than the old, and thus change itself is considered good; in tradition bound Arab cultures, the old is considered better than the new, and thus the retention of the existing order is good.

There are years that ask questions and years that answer.

History never looks like history when you are living through it.

The modernity of yesterday is the tradition of today, and the modernity of today will be tradition tomorrow.

Every generation always thinks it was better before, and I think people have been saying this for probably thousands of years.

To endeavor to rehabilitate the sabbath of our forefathers is as foolish as to try to make people go back into log houses and cook in a fire-place. Some persons can never realize that the world grows; that what was a help to one age becomes a hindrance to another; that time corrects the mistakes of men and that respect and reverence for our ancestors does not necessarily require us to adopt their clothes or their habits.

Liberalism is the philosophy for our time, because it does not try to conserve every tradition of the past, because it does not apply to new problems the old doctrinaire solutions, because it is prepared to experiment and innovate and because it knows that the past is less important than the future.

It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.

As one gets older, one discovers everything is going to be exactly the same with different hats on.

Ask counsel of both timesof the ancient time what is best, and of the latter time what is fittest.

Today's innovation is tomorrow's tradition.

Tradition and heritage are all dead people's baggage, stop carrying it. Move forward.

Those whom we call ancient were really new in all things, and properly constituted the infancy of mankind.

The good old days are neither better nor worse than the ones we're living through right now.

It has been observed that a dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant will see farther than the giant himself; and the moderns, standing as they do on the vantage ground of former discoveries and uniting all the fruits of the experience of their forefathers, with their own actual observation, may be admitted to enjoy a more enlarged and comprehensive view of things than the ancients themselves.

New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth; They must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of truth.

I'd like to speak a foreign language well enough to get the jokes. I'd like to talk with Socrates, and watch Michelangelo sculpt David. I'd like to see the world as it was a million years ago and a million years hence.

My opinion of my whole experience varies from time to time.

There is nothing new on earth / For a person who lives long and experiences much. / In my years of youthful wandering / I have seen crystallized people.

It seems that boredom is one of the greatest discoveries of our time. If so, there's no question but that he must be considered a pioneer.

To look back to antiquity is one thing, to go back to it is another.

History is the queen of the humanities. It teaches wisdom and humility, and it tells us how things change through time.

Morality, too, is a question of time.

I will spark a generation of thinkers who will question traditional thought until they find the absolute truth.