Skip to content

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

— Alfred North Whitehead Attributed Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954)

Another quote →

Topics

Truth

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

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

Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)

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

Adventures of Ideas (1933)

No reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the ground of all rationality.

Science and the Modern World (1925)

The human body is an instrument for the production of art in the life of the human soul.

Adventures of Ideas (1933)

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

An Introduction to Mathematics (1911)

All Alfred North Whitehead quotes →

You may also like

You have to start with the truth. The truth is the only way that we can get anywhere. Because any decision-making that is based upon lies or ignorance can't lead to a good conclusion.

Julian Assange

False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.

Socrates

I believe in evil. It is the property of all those who are certain of truth. Despair and fanaticism are only differing manifestations of evil.

Edward Teller

Wars produce many stories of fiction, some of which are told until they are believed to be true.

Ulysses S. Grant Personal Memoirs of General U. S. Grant (1885)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Alfred North Whitehead (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.