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Alfred North Whitehead
said
In its solitariness the spirit asks, What, in the way of value, is the attainment of life?
— Religion in the Making (February 1926), Lecture II: "Religion and Dogma".
Alfred North Whitehead
English mathematician and philosopher (1861–1947)
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Updated 2026-06-21
He co-wrote the century's defining text in mathematical logic with Bertrand Russell, then walked away from it all to build a metaphysics that flipped Western philosophy: reality isn't made of objects but processes, webs of relation where nothing exists alone.
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Alfred North Whitehead spent his first decades as an English mathematician, collaborating with his former student Bertrand Russell on the three-volume Principia Mathematica between 1910 and 1913 — a work that landed among the twentieth century's most important in mathematical logic and ranked 23rd on Modern Library's top 100 nonfiction list. By the late 1910s he pivoted to philosophy of science, then to metaphysics, where he built a comprehensive system that broke from most of Western thought. He argued that reality consists not of independent material objects but of processes defined by their…
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Alfred North Whitehead
said
There is a quality of life which lies always beyond the mere fact of life; and when we include the quality in the fact, there is still omitted the quality of the quality.
— Religion in the Making (February 1926), Lecture II: "Religion and Dogma".
Alfred North Whitehead
said
Rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality. Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing.
— Religion in the Making (February 1926), Lecture IV: "Truth and Criticism".
Alfred North Whitehead
said
We think in generalities, but we live in detail. To make the past live, we must perceive it in detail in addition to thinking of it in generalities.
— "The Education of an Englishman" in The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 138 (1926), p. 192.
Alfred North Whitehead
said
The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts.
— The Concept of Nature (1919), Chapter VII, p.143.
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