Now in creative thought common sense is a bad master. Its sole criterion for judgement is that the new ideas shall look like the old ones. In other words it can only work by suppressing originality.

- Alfred North Whitehead

Wisdom alone is true ambition's aim. Wisdom the source of virtue, and of fame,? Obtained with labor, for mankind employed,? And then, when most you share it, best enjoyed.

- Alfred North Whitehead

The essence of Christianity is the appeal to the life of Christ as a revelation of the nature of God and of God's agency in the world. The record is fragmentary, inconsistent, and uncertain ... But there can be no doubt as to what elements in the record have evoked a response from all that is best in human nature. The Mother, the Child, and the bare manger: the lowly man, homeless and self-forgetful, with his message of peace, love, and sympathy: the suffering, the agony, the tender words as life ebbed, the final despair: and the whole with the authority of supreme victory.

- Alfred North Whitehead

What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like and immorality is what they dislike.

- Alfred North Whitehead

Education with inert ideas is not only useless; it is above all things harmful.

- Alfred North Whitehead

There is a tradition of opposition between adherents of induction and of deduction. In my view it would be just as sensible for the two ends of a worm to quarrel.

- Alfred North Whitehead

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

- Alfred North Whitehead

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

- Alfred North Whitehead

In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods, they have never forgotten this.

- Alfred North Whitehead

By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and, in effect, increases the mental power of the race.

- Alfred North Whitehead