Frases de Alfred North Whitehead

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“El desvanecimiento de los ideales es triste prueba de la derrota del esfuerzo humano.”

“Desde los primeros pasos de su educación el niño debe experimentar el placer del descubrimiento.”

“Toda la filosofía occidental es una serie de notas a pie de página de la filosofía platónica.”

“El arte ejerce una función curativa en la experiencia humana, al revelar, como en una llamarada, la verdad absoluta e íntima sobre la naturaleza de las cosas.”

“El orden no es suficiente. Lo que se requiere es algo mucho más complejo. Es el orden actuando sobre la novedad, para que la masividad de orden no degenere en mera repetición, y de este modo la novedad siempre se refleje sobre un fondo de sistema.”

“Durante el período escolar, el estudiante ha estado mentalmente inclinado sobre su escritorio; en la universidad debe ponerse de pie y mirar a su alrededor.”

“No hay verdades absolutas; todas las verdades son medias verdades. El mal surge de quererlas tratar como verdades absolutas.”

“Los oscurantistas de cualquier generación están constituidos principalmente por los que practican la metodología dominante.”

“The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment… We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this great science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it.”

“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 precise language awaits a completed metaphysics.”

“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.”

“The relevant poems are Milton's Paradise Lost, Pope's Essay on Man, Wordsworth's Excursion, Tennyson's In Memoriam.”

“Scientists, animated by the purpose of proving they are purposeless, constitute an interesting subject for study.”

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

“Nothing is more impressive than the fact that as mathematics withdrew increasingly into the upper regions of ever greater extremes of abstract thought, it returned back to earth with a corresponding growth of importance for the analysis of concrete fact. …The paradox is now fully established that the utmost abstractions are the true weapons with which to control our thought of concrete fact.”

“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.”

“Mathematics as an Element in the History of Thought.”

“Intolerance is the besetting sin of moral fervour.”

“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.”

“Life is complex in its expression, involving more than percipience, namely desire, emotion, will, and feeling.”

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

“Without doubt, if we are to go back to that ultimate, integral experience, unwarped by the sophistications of theory, that experience whose elucidation is the final aim of philosophy, the flux of things is one ultimate generalization around which we must weave our philosophical system.”

“He has been named respectively, Jehovah, Allah, Brahma, Father in Heaven, Order of Heaven, First Cause, Supreme Being, Chance. Each name corresponds to a system of thought derived from the experiences of those who have used it…. He has been conceived as the foundation of the metaphysical situation with its ultimate activity. If this conception be adhered to, there can be no alternative except to discern in Him the origin of all evil as well as of all good. He is then the supreme author of the play, and to him must therefore be ascribed its shortcomings as well as its success.”

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

“Identification of rhythm as the causal counterpart of life; wherever there is some life, only perceptible to us when the analogies are sufficiently close.”

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

“Our habitual experience is a complex of failure and success in the enterprise of interpretation. If we desire a record of uninterpreted experience, we must ask a stone to record its autobiography.”

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

“The chief danger to philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence.”

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

“It is the business of the future to be dangerous; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties.”

“That knowledge which adds greatness to character is knowledge so handled as to transform every phase of immediate experience.”

“It is the first step in sociological wisdom, to recognize that the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur:—like unto an arrow in the hand of a child. The art of free society consists first in the maintenance of the symbolic code; and secondly in fearlessness of revision, to secure that the code serves those purposes which satisfy an enlightened reason. Those societies which cannot combine reverence to their symbols with freedom of revision, must ultimately decay either from anarchy, or from the slow atrophy of a life stifled by useless shadows.”

“The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention.”

“Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilisation of knowledge.”

“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.”