Alfred North Whitehead's Quotes

What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like and immorality is what they dislike.

Without adventure civilization is in full decay.

But you can catch yourself entertaining habitually certain ideas and setting others aside; and that, I think, is where our personal destinies are largely decided.

I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning, or destroyed it altogether.

The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervor, live for it, and if need be, die for it.

Wisdom alone is true ambition's aim, wisdom is the source of virtue and of fame; obtained with labour, for mankind employed, and then, when most you share it, best enjoyed.

No one who achieves success does so without acknowledging the help of others. The wise and confident acknowledge this help with gratitude.

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.

Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.

True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes, but the firm resolve of virtue and reason.

If a dog jumps into your lap, it is because he is fond of you; but if a cat does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer.

In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory.

No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it.

Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.

Seek simplicity but distrust it.

There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays to the devil.

When you're average, you're just as close to the bottom as you are the top.

Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, seek simplicity and distrust it.

Familiar things happen, and mankind does not bother about them. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.

Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of life is to grasp as much as we can out of that infinitude.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression.

Knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows.

Almost all new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.

An enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words.

Common sense is genius in homespun.

I would be a billionaire if I was looking to be a selfish boss. That's not me.

'Sag Harbor' was a very different book for me. It changed the way I thought about books that I wanted to do.

I was inspired to become a writer by horror movies and science fiction.

I'm just trying to keep things rich for me creatively and for the readers who follow me.

What isn't said is as important as what is said.

Write what you know.

You can't rush inspiration.

A lot of my writer friends live near me, and that makes people think we just hang around with one another in cafes, trading work and discussing 'Harper's' and what not. But I rarely see them. We're home working.

Early on my career, I figured out that I just have to write the book I have to write at that moment. Whatever else is going on in the culture is just not that important. If you could get the culture to write your book, that would be great. But the culture can't write your book.

Growing up devouring horror comics and novels, and being inspired to become a writer because of horror novels, movies, and comic books, I always knew I was going to write a horror novel.

I get invited to do panels with other Brooklyn writers to discuss what it's like to be a writer in Brooklyn. I expect it's like writing in Manhattan, but there aren't as many tourists walking very slowly in front of you when you step out for coffee. It's like writing in Paris, but there are fewer people speaking French.

I grew up reading the 'Village Voice' and wanting to be one of these multidisciplinary music writers, film writers, book writers. And I lucked out getting a job at the 'Voice' right after college.

I live in Brooklyn. I moved here 14 years ago for the cheap rent. It was a little embarrassing because I was raised in Manhattan, and so I was a bit of a snob about the other boroughs.