Alfred North Whitehead

"Almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced. "

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

"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. "

"Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it. "

"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. "

"Ideas won't keep something must be done about them. "

"If a dog jumps in 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. "

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

"It does not matter what men say in words, so long as their activities are controlled by settled instincts. The words may ultimately destroy the instincts. But until this has occurred, words do not count. - from Science and the Modern World "

"It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious. "

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

"Religion is what a person does in his solitariness. "

"Seek simplicity, and distrust it. "

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

"The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them. "

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

"We cannot think first and act afterward. From the moment of birth we are immersed in action, and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought. "

"We think in generalities, but we live in detail. "