Alfred North Whitehead

1861–1947 · English mathematician and philosopher

Topics: learning, mathematics, simplicity, creativity

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

  — Alfred North Whitehead

• In a sense, all explanation must end in an ultimate arbitrariness.

  — Alfred North Whitehead

• Systems, scientific and philosophic, come and go. Each method of limited understanding is at length exhausted. In its prime each system is a triumphant success: in its decay it is an obstructive nuisance.

  — Alfred North Whitehead

• The consequences of a plethora of half-digested theoretical knowledge are deplorable.

  — Alfred North Whitehead

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

  — Alfred North Whitehead

• [T]he pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit.

  — Alfred North Whitehead

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

  — Alfred North Whitehead

• [A]ll science as it grows towards perfection becomes mathematical in its ideas.

  — Alfred North Whitehead

• If you have had your attention directed to the novelties in thought in your own lifetime, you will have observed that almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.

  — Alfred North Whitehead

• Heaven knows what seeming nonsense may not to-morrow be demonstrated truth.

  — Alfred North Whitehead

• What the learned world tends to offer is one second-hand scrap of information illustrating ideas derived from another second-hand scrap of information. The second-handedness of the learned world is the secret of its mediocrity.

  — Alfred North Whitehead

• The main importance of Francis Bacon’s influence does not lie in any peculiar theory of inductive reasoning which he happened to express, but in the revolt against second-hand information of which he was a leader.

  — Alfred North Whitehead

• By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and in effect increases the mental power of the race.

  — Alfred North Whitehead

• Seek simplicity and distrust it.

  — Alfred North Whitehead

• That knowledge which adds greatness to character is knowledge so handled as to transform every phase of immediate experience.

  — Alfred North Whitehead

• Rationalism is an adventure in the clarification of thought.

  — Alfred North Whitehead

• It belongs to the self-respect of intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final unravelment.

  — Alfred North Whitehead

• We do not require elaborate training merely in order to refrain from embarking upon intricate trains of inference. Such abstinence is only too easy.

  — Alfred North Whitehead

• It is a safe rule to apply that, when a mathematical or philosophical author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense.

  — Alfred North Whitehead

• If science is not to degenerate into a medley of ad hoc hypotheses, it must become philosophical and must enter upon a thorough criticism of its own foundations.

  — Alfred North Whitehead