ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD

No one who achieves success does so without acknowledging the help of others. The wise and confident acknowledge this help with gratitude.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes, but the firm resolve of virtue and reason.

If a dog jumps into your lap, it is because he is fond of you; but if a cat does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer.

It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious.

In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory.

The absolute pacifist is a bad citizen; times come when force must be used to uphold right, justice and ideals.

Periods of tranquility are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.

But you can catch yourself entertaining habitually certain ideas and setting others aside; and that, I think, is where our personal destinies are largely decided.

I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning, or destroyed it altogether.

Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.

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

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

When you're average, you're just as close to the bottom as you are the top.

Wisdom alone is true ambition's aim, wisdom is the source of virtue and of fame; obtained with labour, for mankind employed, and then, when most you share it, best enjoyed.

Civilizations can only be understood by those who are civilized.

Seek simplicity but distrust it.

Knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows.

Speak out in acts; the time for words has passed, and only deeds will suffice.

Simple solutions seldom are. It takes a very unusual mind to undertake analysis of the obvious.

Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of life is to grasp as much as we can out of that infinitude.

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

Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure.

Fools act on imagination without knowledge, pedants act on knowledge without imagination.

No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it.