132 quotes
Religion is an ultimate craving to infuse into the insistent particularity of emotion that non-temporal generality which primarily belongs to conceptual thought alone.
Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)
Seek simplicity and distrust it.
The Concept of Nature (1919)
The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order.
Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)
The relevant poems are Milton's Paradise Lost, Pope's Essay on Man, Wordsworth's Excursion, Tennyson's In Memoriam.
Science and the Modern World (1925)
The consequences of a plethora of half-digested theoretical knowledge are deplorable.
The Aims of Education (1929)
Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilisation of knowledge.
The Aims of Education (1929)
Mathematics as an Element in the History of Thought.
Science and the Modern World (1925)
The salvation of reality is its obstinate, irreducible, matter-of-fact entities, which are limited to be no other than themselves. Neither science, nor art, nor creative action can tear itself away from obstinate, irreducible, limited facts.
Science and the Modern World (1925)
Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.
Modes of Thought (1938)
The ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction.
Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)
Each atom is a system of all things.
What the learned world tends to offer is one second-hand scrap of information illustrating ideas derived from another second-hand scrap of information. The second-handedness of the learned world is the secret of its mediocrity.
The Aims of Education (1929)
No epoch is homogeneous; whatever you may have assigned as the dominant note of a considerable period, it will always be possible to produce men, and great men, belonging to the same time, who exhibit themselves as antagonistic to the tone of their age.
Science and the Modern World (1925)
[T]he pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit.
Science and the Modern World (1925)
[F]ertilisation of the soul is the reason for the necessity of art.
Science and the Modern World (1925)
[W]e cannot think first and act afterwards. From the moment of birth we are immersed in action, and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought.
Science and the Modern World (1925)
The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest.
The Concept of Nature (1919)
Our habitual experience is a complex of failure and success in the enterprise of interpretation. If we desire a record of uninterpreted experience, we must ask a stone to record its autobiography.
Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)
The fact of the religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience.
Science and the Modern World (1925)
The essence of education is that it be religious. Pray, what is religious education? A religious education is an education which inculcates duty and reverence.
The Aims of Education (1929)