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Quotes from Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology — Alfred North Whitehead

1861–1947 England

← All quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

25 quotes

In all philosophic theory there is an ultimate which is actual in virtue of its accidents.

Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)

The chief danger to philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence.

Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)

There is nothing in the real world which is merely an inert fact. Every reality is there for feeling: it promotes feeling; and it is felt.

Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)

Consciousness is only the last and greatest of such elements by which the selective character of the individual obscures the external totality from which it originates and which it embodies.

Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)

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

Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)

Philosophy may not neglect the multifariousness of the world — the fairies dance, and Christ is nailed to the cross.

Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)

It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity.

Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)

Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity.

Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)

The task of philosophy is to recover the totality obscured by the selection.

Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)

One side makes process ultimate; the other side makes fact ultimate.

Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)

The term many presupposes the term one, and the term one presupposes the term many.

Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)

Rationalism is an adventure in the clarification of thought.

Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)

The chief error in philosophy is overstatement.

Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)

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)

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 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)

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)

A precise language awaits a completed metaphysics.

Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)

For the kingdom of heaven is with us today.

Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)

Whether or no it be for the general good, life is robbery. It is at this point that with life morals become acute. The robber requires justification.

Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Alfred North Whitehead (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.