Alfred North Whitehead Science Quotations

In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Seek simplicity, and distrust it.

The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanation of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be ``Seek simplicity and distrust it.''

The aims of scientific thought are to see the general in the particular and the eternal in the transitory.

Without deductive logic science would be entirely useless. It is merely a barren game to ascend from the particular to the general, unless afterwards we can reverse the process and descend from the general to the particular, ascending and descending like angels on Jacob's ladder.

Aristotle discovered all the half-truths which were necessary to the creation of science.

A science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost.

Science repudiates philosophy. In other words, it has never cared to justify its truth or explain its meaning.