"Mr. Alfred North Whitehead has pointed out that one of our chief literary sins is in thinking of past and future in terms of a thousand years forward and backward, when really to experience the organic nature of past and future one should think of time in the order of a second, or a fraction of a second. One can make a similar remark about our esthetic perceptions... one of the signs of a rational enjoyment of the machine and the machine-made environment is to be concerned with much smaller differences and to react sensitively to them."

"In "Religion in the Making," by A. N. Whitehead... the approach is philosophical, and there are many interesting and valuable observations. But Dr. Whitehead occasionally indulges himself, like all metaphysicians, in what has a suspicious resemblance to nonsense."

"Our time has seen the best-educated society, situated in the heart of the most civilized part of the world, give birth to the most murderously vengeful government in history. Forty years ago the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead thought it self-evident that you would get a good government if you took power out of the hands of the acquisitive and gave it to the learned and the cultivated. At present, a child in kindergarten knows better than that."

"Professor Whitehead has recently restored a seventeenth century phrase—"climate of opinion." The phrase is much needed. Whether arguments command assent or not depends less upon the logic that conveys them than upon the climate of opinion in which they are sustained."

"Alfred North Whitehead, whose philosophical works pushed back heretofore perceived boundaries of thought and re-framed Western epistemology."

"Shakespeare wrote better poetry for not knowing too much; Milton, I think, knew too much finally for the good of his poetry."

"The English never abolish anything. They put it in cold storage."

"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."

"Ninety percent of our lives is governed by emotion. Our brains merely register and act upon what is telegraphed to them by our bodily experience. Intellect is to emotion as our clothes are to our bodies; we could not very well have civilized life without clothes, but we would be in a poor way if we had only clothes without bodies."

"With the sense of sight, the idea communicates the emotion, whereas, with sound, the emotion communicates the idea, which is more direct and therefore more powerful."

"A philosopher of imposing stature doesn't think in a vacuum. Even his most abstract ideas are, to some extent, conditioned by what is or is not known in the time when he lives."

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

"The ideas of Freud were popularized by people who only imperfectly understood them, who were incapable of the great effort required to grasp them in their relationship to larger truths, and who therefore assigned to them a prominence out of all proportion to their true importance."

"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."

"A culture is in its finest flower before it begins to analyze itself."

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

"Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended."

"The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervor, live for it, and, if need be, die for it."

"A man really writes for an audience of about ten persons. Of course if others like it, that is clear gain. But if those ten are satisfied, he is content."

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

"Buddhism is the most colossal example in the history of applied metaphysics."

"I have always noticed that deeply and truly religious persons are fond of a joke, and I am suspicious of those who aren’t."

"A race preserves its vigour so long as it harbours a real contrast between what has been and what may be, and so long as it is nerved by the vigour to adventure beyond the safeties of the past. Without adventure, civilization is in full decay."

"A general definition of civilization: a civilized society is exhibiting the five qualities of truth, beauty, adventure, art, peace."

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

"The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy."

"The deliberate aim at Peace very easily passes into its bastard substitute, Anesthesia."

"Systems, scientific and philosophic, come and go. Each method of limited understanding is at length exhausted. In its prime each system is a triumphant success: in its decay it is an obstructive nuisance."

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

"In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as if it were a mist, cloaking the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reasoning grasps at straws for premises and floats on gossamer for deductions."

"Intolerance is the besetting sin of moral fervour."

"The mentality of mankind and the language of mankind created each other. If we like to assume the rise of language as a given fact, then it is not going too far to say that the souls of men are the gift from language to mankind. The account of the sixth day should be written: He gave them speech, and they became souls."

"No member of a crew is praised for the rugged individuality of his rowing."

"We find here the final application of the doctrine of objective immortality. Throughout the perishing occasions in the life of each temporal Creature, the inward source of distaste or of refreshment, the judge arising out of the very nature of things, redeemer or goddess of mischief, is the transformation of Itself, everlasting in the Being of God. In this way, the insistent craving is justified — the insistent craving that zest for existence be refreshed by the ever-present, unfading importance of our immediate actions, which perish and yet live for evermore."

"For the kingdom of heaven is with us today."

"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."

"The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order."

"Error is the price we pay for progress."

"Thus the universe is to be conceived as attaining the active self-expression of its own variety of opposites of its own freedom and its own necessity, of its own multiplicity and its own unity, of its own imperfection and its own perfection. All the opposites are elements in the nature of things, and are incorrigibly there. The concept of God is the way in which we understand this incredible fact that what cannot be, yet is."

"In the inescapable flux, there is something that abides; in the overwhelming permanence, there is an element that escapes into flux. Permanence can be snatched only out of flux; and the passing moment can find its adequate intensity only by its submission to permanence."

"A precise language awaits a completed metaphysics."

"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."

"Some philosophers fail to distinguish propositions from judgments; … But in the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. The importance of truth is that it adds to interest."

"The theme of Cosmology, which is the basis of all religions, is the story of the dynamic effort of the World passing into everlasting unity, and of the static majesty of God's vision, accomplishing its purpose of completion by absorption of the World's multiplicity of effort."