Seek simplicity but distrust it.
~ Alfred North Whitehead - [Simplicity]

Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language.
~ Alfred North Whitehead - [Speech]

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking.
~ Alfred North Whitehead - [Thoughts and Thinking]

We think in generalities, but we live in detail.
~ Alfred North Whitehead - [Thoughts and Thinking]

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.
~ Alfred North Whitehead - [Truth]

Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning.
~ Alfred North Whitehead - [Philosophers and Philosophy]

Philosophy is the product of wonder.
~ Alfred North Whitehead - [Philosophers and Philosophy]

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order.
~ Alfred North Whitehead - [Progress]

Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.
~ Alfred North Whitehead - [Quotations]

Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct form ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.
~ Alfred North Whitehead - [Intelligence and Intellectuals]

Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.
~ Alfred North Whitehead - [Life and Living]

An enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words.
~ Alfred North Whitehead - [Experience]

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 - [Familiarity]

In every age of well-marked transition, there is the pattern of habitual dumb practice and emotion which is passing and there is oncoming a new complex of habit.
~ Alfred North Whitehead - [Habit]

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 - [Ideas]

Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.
~ Alfred North Whitehead - [Ideas]

True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes. Rather the firm resolve of virtue and reason.
~ Alfred North Whitehead - [Courage]

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.
~ Alfred North Whitehead - [Destiny]

Ideas won't keep, something must be done about them.
~ Alfred North Whitehead - [Action]

Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.
~ Alfred North Whitehead - [Action]