Alfred North Whitehead

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 the devil.

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

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.

I have always noticed that deeply and truly religious persons are fond of a joke, and I am suspicious of those who aren't.

Fools act on imagination without knowledge, pedants act on knowledge without imagination.

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

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

Knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows.

It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious.

Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language.

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 deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.

We think in generalities, but we live in detail.

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

Every philosophy is tinged with the colouring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning.

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.

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

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

The absolute pacifist is a bad citizen times come when force must be used to uphold right, justice and ideals.

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.

Without adventure civilization is in full decay.

Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct form ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.

Common sense is genius in homespun.

Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new its custodians have fervour, live for it, and, if need be, die for it.