Whitehead, Alfred North

"The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts with the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational analysis."

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

"The paradox is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality ought to be."

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

"Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilisation of knowledge."

"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."

"Seek simplicity and distrust it."

"Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe."

"The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order."

"Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them."

"The basis of all beauty is mathematical."

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

"The purpose of freedom is to create conditions under which it can flourish."

"Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness."

"I would be appalled if I thought that the conception of my work was narrowed down merely to a consideration of science."

"The only justification for religions is that they preserve the delivery of the spirit."

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

"Common sense is the mythology of science."

"It is a false dichotomy to think that we can devote ourselves either to the intellectual or to the physical aspects of life."

"The human body is a mechanism which winds up its own springs. It grows by the incorporation of foreign matter."

"Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas."

"The distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."

"Mathematical beauty is felt in the same way as any other kind of beauty."

"Rhythm is the response to the demand for a pattern in what is apprehended."

"Knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows."

"The advantages arising from philosophy are small; but they are not to be despised."

"Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew."

"The pure conservative is fighting against the essence of the universe."

"Adventure is the active phase in novelty."

"Neither religion nor science nor philosophy nor art can have any success in any degree without adventure."