Whitehead, Alfred North

"Consciousness is not a thing, but a process of creative integration."

"The paradox of freedom is that true freedom requires discipline and responsibility."

"Every age believes itself to be in crisis; perhaps crisis is the normal state of existence."

"The quest for certainty is the great impediment to understanding; embrace ambiguity and complexity."

"Immortality is achieved not through the avoidance of death, but through work that outlives us."

"The heart has reasons that reason itself cannot comprehend; both must have their say."

"A society that has lost the capacity for wonder has lost its soul."

"The universe is intelligible to the human mind precisely because mind is part of the universe."

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

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

"The basis of democracy is faith in the common people and their capacity for self-governance."

"Religious symbolism is the only language in which certain ideas can be adequately expressed."

"No one who achieves success does so without acknowledging the help of others."

"The tremendous power of a weapon of war has caused it to be treated as a thing to be independent of the moral agents involved."

"Fools act on imagination without knowledge; pedants act on knowledge without imagination."

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

"Education should be the process of the most wonderful unfolding."

"Art is the imitation of nature in her manner of operation."

"The true method of philosophy is like the flight of an aeroplane."

"Creativity is the ultimate expression of human freedom."

"The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment."

"All science as it grows towards perfection becomes mathematical in its ideas."

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

"Seek simplicity, and distrust it."

"The paradox of realism is only to be avoided by the recognition that the universe exhibits a creativity irreducible to either mentality or physicality."

"Intelligence is not to make no mistakes but to see quickly how to remedy them."

"Apart from blunt truth, our lives sink decadently amid the perfume of hints and suggestions."

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

"The purpose of philosophy is to rationalize mysticism: not to deny it."

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