Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

The abstract kills, the concrete saves.

We coin concepts and we use them to analyse and explain nature and society. But we seem to forget, midway, that these concepts are our own constructs and start equating them with reality.

Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.

At first it seems obvious, but the more you think about it the stranger the deductions from this axiom seem to become; in the end you cease to understand what is meant by it.

Metaphysics is a cobweb that the mind weaves around things.

To make use of your mind to think conceptually is to leave substance and attach yourself to form

Nobody is driven by abstractions like 'seeking truth.

To make abstractions hold in reality is to destroy reality.

There is a very good saying that if triangles invented a god, they would make him three-sided.

The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.

A mathematician ... has no material to work with but ideas, and so his patterns are likely to last longer, since ideas wear less with time than words.

Obviously a drawing of a person is not a real person, but a drawing of a line is a real line.

Possibly the words materialism and spirituality express two sides of one and the same fact.

I may indeed very well happen to contradict myself; but truth, as Demades said, I do not contradict.

Arithmetic has a very great and elevating effect, compelling the soul to reason about abstract number, and rebelling against the introduction of visible or tngible objects into the argument.

Form and formless are intertwined in this world. The formless can only be expressed in form and form can only be thought with the formless.

The emblem of a philosophy is not that it contains a set of specific thoughts , but that it generates a way of thinking.

Which came first, the mind or the idea of the mind? Have you never wondered? They arrived together. The mind is an idea.

It is not that there are no certainties, it is that it is an absolute certainty that there are no certainties.

For the only way one can speak of nothing is to speak of it as though it were something, just as the only way one can speak of God is to speak of him as though he were a man, which to be sure he was, in a sense, for a time, and as the only way one can speak of man, even our anthropologists have realized that, is to speak of him as though he were a termite.

A mind that is very selective to forms... is apt to use its images metaphorically, to exploit their possible significance for the conception of remote or intangible ideas.

One man's antinomy is another man's falsidical paradox, give or take a couple of thousand years.

Generalities are intellectually necessary evils.

Aristotle discovered all the half-truths which were necessary to the creation of science.

I can imagine anything except having no imagination.