Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

Psychology which explains everything explains nothing, and we are still in doubt.

Given that we cannot know all the elements in a problem, we never can solve it.

We fail when we try to give simple answers to complicated problems.

She studied my face for a long minute. "Are you going to help my mom?" It was a simple question. But how do you tell a child that things just aren't that simple, that some questions don't have simple answers--or any answer at all?

Sometimes a simple question could have a complicated answer.

Stupidity consists in wanting to reach conclusions. We are a thread, and we want to know the whole cloth.

I do not need to know all things. I remind myself that it is sufficient that I know what I know and know that without believing that I will always know what I know or that what I know will always be true.

It is a simple procedure to calculate the number of seeds in an apple. But who among us can ever say how many apples are in a seed?

Nothing in life is ever as simple as we imagine.

Living isn't a simple thing...no one said it's supposed to be.

Ignorance lies at the bottom of all human knowledge, and the deeper we penetrate, the nearer we arrive unto it.

Prediction is difficult - particularly when it involves the future.

Our agenda, by necessity, is as complex and encompassing as the problems we face: beware of politicians promising simple solutions.

But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.

It is difficult to discuss... history.. it is more difficult to talk about today.. simple things…

It seems to me that the great pleasure of human life is not in having an opinion, but rather in learning all the ways you are wrong, and all the nuances you failed to account for, and all the truths that turned out to be not as simple as you once believed. And it seems to me that one of the central pleasures of attending school is that you get to read with really well-informed people who can help welcome you into a complex world stuffed with rich and maddening ambiguity.

The more one thinks, the more one feels the hopeless immensity of man's ignorance.

What I learned is that it's arrogant to be certain of anything. The world is a complex place and only idiots or assholes think they know it all.

One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.

No one infers a god from the simple, from the known, from what is understood, but from the complex, from the unknown, and incomprehensible. Our ignorance is God; what we know is science.

Simple it's not, I'm afraid you will find, for a mind maker-upper to make up his mind

The world, even the smallest parts of it, is filled with things you don't know.

I'm suspicious of too much certainty in the pursuit of understanding just because I think people are limited in their understanding.

All large political doctrines are rich in difficult problems - problems that are quite above the average citizen's reach. And that is not strange, since they are also above the reach of the ablest minds in the country; after all the fuss and all the talk, not one of those doctrines has been conclusively proven to be the right one and the best.

How little we know of what there is to know.