Alfred North Whitehead

Familiar things happen, and mankind does not bother about them. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

Fools act on imagination without knowledge, pedants act on knowledge without imagination.The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, "Seek simplicity and distrust it."

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.

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

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

Consciousness is only the last and greatest of such elements by which the selective character of the individual obscures the external totality from which it originates and which it embodies.

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

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

Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas.