Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance is the death of knowledge. — Alfred North Whitehead

Get your knowledge quickly and then use it. If you can use it you will retain it. — Alfred North Whitehead

The only use of knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present. — Alfred North Whitehead

Knowledge does not keep any better than fish. — Alfred North Whitehead

Fools act on imagination without knowledge, pedants act on knowledge without imagination. — Alfred North Whitehead

You cannot be wise without some basis of knowledge, but you may easily acquire knowledge and remain bare of wisdom. — Alfred North Whitehead

Knowledge is always accompanied with accessories of emotion and purpose. — Alfred North Whitehead

The consequences of a plethora of half–digested theoretical knowledge are deplorable. — Alfred North Whitehead

Knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows. — Alfred North Whitehead

On the ostensible exactitude of certain branches of human knowledge, including mathematics. The exactness is a fake. — Alfred North Whitehead

The self–satisfied dogmatism with which mankind at each period of its history cherishes the delusion of the finality of existing modes of knowledge. — Alfred North Whitehead

Knowledge keeps no better than fish. — Alfred North Whitehead

The only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present. The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground; for it is the past, and it is the future. — 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

Common sense is genius in homespun. — Alfred North Whitehead

Human nature loses its most precious quality when it is robbed of its sense of things beyond, unexplored and yet insistent. — Alfred North Whitehead

Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure. — Alfred North Whitehead

In a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus every spatio–temporal standpoint mirrors the world — Alfred North Whitehead

Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure, a sense of nothing having been done before, of complete freedom to experiment. — Alfred North Whitehead

Style, in its finest sense, is the last acquirement of the educated mind; it is also the most useful. It pervades the whole being. — Alfred North Whitehead

In a sense, knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows: for details are swallowed up in principles. — Alfred North Whitehead

With the sense of sight, the idea communicates the emotion, whereas, with sound, the emotion communicates the idea, which is more direct and therefore more powerful. — Alfred North Whitehead

Civilizations can only be understood by those who are civilized. — Alfred North Whitehead

Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it. — Alfred North Whitehead

Ninety percent of our lives is governed by emotion. — Alfred North Whitehead

Youth is life as yet unblemished by much tragedy, but hardly by TV. — Alfred North Whitehead

The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy. — Alfred North Whitehead

Life is the enjoyment of emotion, derived from the past and aimed at the future. — Alfred North Whitehead

Identification of rhythm as the casual counterpart of life; wherever there is some life, only perceptible to us when the analogies are sufficiently close. — Alfred North Whitehead

There is a quality of life which lies always beyond the mere fact of life; and when we include the quality in the fact, there is still omitted the quality of the quality. — Alfred North Whitehead

Apart from blunt truth, our lives sink decadently amid the perfume of hints and suggestions. — Alfred North Whitehead

Symbolism is no mere idle fancy or corrupt degeneration: it is inherent in the very texture of human life. — Alfred North Whitehead

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

Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe. — Alfred North Whitehead

It is natural to think that an abstract science cannot be of much importance in affairs of human life, because it has omitted from its consideration everything of real interest. — Alfred North Whitehead

Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language. — Alfred North Whitehead

Religion increasingly is tending to degenerate into a decent formula wherewith to embellish a comfortable life. — Alfred North Whitehead

One main factor in the upward trend of animal life has been the power of wandering. — Alfred North Whitehead

Life is complex in its expression, involving more than percipience, namely desire, emotion, will, and feeling. — Alfred North Whitehead

A philosopher of imposing stature doesn’t think in a vacuum. Even his most abstract ideas are, to some extent, conditioned by what is or is not known in the time when he lives. — Alfred North Whitehead

The justification for a university is that it preserves the connection between knowledge and the zest of life, by uniting the young and the old in the imaginative consideration of learning. — Alfred North Whitehead

The factor in human life provocative of a noble discontent is the gradual emergence of a sense of criticism, founded upon appreciation of beauty, and of intellectual distinction, and of duty. — Alfred North Whitehead

The point about zero is that we do not need to use it in the operation of daily life. No one goes out to buy zero fish. — Alfred North Whitehead

The human body is an instrument for the production of art in the life of the human soul. — Alfred North Whitehead

The motive of success is not enough. — Alfred North Whitehead

Education should turn out the pupil with something he knows well and something he can do well. — Alfred North Whitehead

The antithesis between a technical and a liberal education is fallacious. There can be no adequate technical education which is not liberal, and no liberal education which is not technical. — Alfred North Whitehead

Education with inert ideas is not only useless; it is above all things harmful. — Alfred North Whitehead

Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilisation of knowledge. — Alfred North Whitehead

In all education the main cause of failure is staleness. — Alfred North Whitehead

Education which is not modern share the fate of all organic things which are kept too long. — Alfred North Whitehead

The purpose of education is not to fill a vessel but to kindle a flame. — Alfred North Whitehead

All practical teachers know that education is a patient process of mastery of details, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day. — Alfred North Whitehead

Dogmatism is the anti–Christ of learning. — Alfred North Whitehead

Religion is the last refuge of human savagery. — Alfred North Whitehead

Vedanta is the most impressive metaphysics the human mind has conceived. — Alfred North Whitehead

The pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit. — Alfred North Whitehead

Religion is the reaction of human nature to its search for God. — Alfred North Whitehead

Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language. — Alfred North Whitehead

It is impossible to meditate on time and the mystery of nature without an overwhelming emotion at the limitations of human intelligence. — Alfred North Whitehead

I consider Christian theology to be one of the great disasters of the human race. — Alfred North Whitehead

I consider Christianity to be one of the great disasters of the human race… It would be impossible to imagine anything more un–Christianlike than theology. — Alfred North Whitehead

Each human being is a more complex structure than any social system to which he belongs. — Alfred North Whitehead

The difference between ancients and moderns is that the ancients asked what have we experienced, and moderns asked what can we experience. — Alfred North Whitehead

The tragedy of the world is that those who are imaginative have but slight experience, and those who are experienced have feeble imaginations. — Alfred North Whitehead

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience. — Alfred North Whitehead

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

An enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words. — Alfred North Whitehead

From the very beginning of his education, the child should experience the joy of discovery. — 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

Our habitual experience is a complex of failure and success in the enterprise of interpretation. If we desire a record of uninterpreted experience, we must ask a stone to record its autobiography. — Alfred North Whitehead

No Roman ever died in contemplation over a geometrical diagram. — Alfred North Whitehead

Vigorous societies harbour a certain extravagance of objectives. — Alfred North Whitehead

Rationalism is an adventure in the clarification of thought. — Alfred North Whitehead

To see what is general in what is particular, and what is permanent in what is transitory, is the aim of scientific thought. — Alfred North Whitehead

The aims of scientific thought are to see the general in the particular and the eternal in the transitory. — Alfred North Whitehead

It belongs to the self–respect of intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final unravelment. — Alfred North Whitehead

Philosophy begins in wonder. And at the end when philosophic thought has done its best the wonder remains. — Alfred North Whitehead

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. — Alfred North Whitehead

The task of a university is the creation of the future, so far as rational thought and civilized modes of appreciation can affect the issue. — Alfred North Whitehead

The paradox is now fully established that the utmost abstractions are the true weapons with which to control our thought of concrete fact. — Alfred North Whitehead

The foundations of the world are to be found, not in the cognitive experience of conscious thought, but in the aesthetic experience of everyday life. — Alfred North Whitehead

Philosophy is the product of wonder. The effort after the general characterization of the world around us is the romance of human thought. — Alfred North Whitehead

There is no greater hindrance to the progress of thought than an attitude of irritated party–spirit. — Alfred North Whitehead

From the moment of birth we are immersed in action, and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought. — Alfred North Whitehead

Now in creative thought common sense is a bad master. Its sole criterion for judgement is that the new ideas shall look like the old ones. In other words it can only work by suppressing originality. — Alfred North Whitehead

Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it. A merely well informed man is the most useless bore on God’s earth. — Alfred North Whitehead

A Unitarian is a person who believes in at most one God. — Alfred North Whitehead

Ideas won’t keep. Something must be done about them. — Alfred North Whitehead

A science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost. — Alfred North Whitehead

No science can be more secure than the unconscious metaphysics which tacitly it presupposes. — Alfred North Whitehead

Aristotle discovered all the half–truths which were necessary to the creation of science. — Alfred North Whitehead

Mathematics as a science, commenced when first someone, probably a Greek, proved propositions about ‘any’ things or about ‘some’ things, without specifications of definite particular things. — Alfred North Whitehead

Faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology. — Alfred North Whitehead

The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanation of complex facts… Seek simplicity and distrust it. — Alfred North Whitehead

A man of science doesn’t discover in order to know, he wants to know in order to discover. — Alfred North Whitehead

The vastest knowledge of today cannot transcend the buddhi of the Rishis in ancient India; and science in its most advanced stage now is closer to Vedanta than ever before. — Alfred North Whitehead

The science of pure mathematics, in its modern developments, may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit. — Alfred North Whitehead

Science repudiates philosophy. In other words, it has never cared to justify its truth or explain its meaning. — Alfred North Whitehead

No man of science wants merely to know. He acquires knowledge to appease his passion for discovery. He does not discover in order to know, he knows in order to discover. — Alfred North Whitehead

The worst that happened to men of science was that Galileo suffered an honorable detention and a mild reproof, before dying peacefully in his bed. — Alfred North Whitehead

Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science. — Alfred North Whitehead