Almost all new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.
Alfred North Whitehead

An enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words.
Alfred North Whitehead

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.
Alfred North Whitehead

Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure.
Alfred North Whitehead

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

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.
Alfred North Whitehead

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

Civilizations can only be understood by those who are civilized.
Alfred North Whitehead

Common sense is genius in homespun.
Alfred North Whitehead

Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning.
Alfred North Whitehead

Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.
Alfred North Whitehead

Familiar things happen, and mankind does not bother about them. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.
Alfred North Whitehead

Fools act on imagination without knowledge, pedants act on knowledge without imagination.
Alfred North Whitehead

Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas.
Alfred North Whitehead

Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.
Alfred North Whitehead

I have always noticed that deeply and truly religious persons are fond of a joke, and I am suspicious of those who aren't.
Alfred North Whitehead

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.
Alfred North Whitehead

I would be a billionaire if I was looking to be a selfish boss. That's not me.
Alfred North Whitehead

Ideas won't keep; something must be done about them.
Alfred North Whitehead

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.
Alfred North Whitehead