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.

The vitality of thought is in adventure. Idea's 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. Their inheritors receive the idea, perhaps now strong and successful, but without inheriting the fervour; so the idea settles down to a comfortable middle age, turns senile, and dies.

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

As society is now constituted, a literal adherence to the moral precepts scattered throughout the Gospels would mean sudden death.

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.

Inventive genius requires pleasurable mental activity as a condition for its vigorous exercise. "Necessity is the mother of invention" is a silly proverb. "Necessity is the mother of futile dodges" is much closer to the truth. The basis of growth of modern invention is science, and science is almost wholly the outgrowth of pleasurable intellectual curiosity.

The progress of Science consists in observing interconnections and in showing with a patient ingenuity that the events of this ever-shifting world are but examples of a few general relations, called laws. To see what is general in what is particular, and what is permanent in what is transitory, is the aim of scientific thought.

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.

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

The only use of knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present.

A race preserves its vigor so long as it harbors a real contrast between what has been and what may be; and so long as it is nerved by the vigor to adventure beyond the safeties of the past. Without adventure civilization is in full decay.

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

It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

To come very near to a true theory, and to grasp its precise application, are two different things, as the history of science teaches us. Everything of importance has been said before by someone who did not discover it.

Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.

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.

...the self-satisfied dogmatism with which mankind at each period of its history cherishes the delusion of the finality of existing modes of knowledge.

Civilizations can only be understood by those who are civilized.

Great dreamers' dreams are never fulfilled, they are always transcended.

A science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost.

A clash of doctrine is not a disaster, it is an opportunity.