Alfred North Whitehead

Without adventure civilization is in full decay.

Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure.

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

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

Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.

The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, seek simplicity and distrust it.

The absolute pacifist is a bad citizen; times come when force must be used to uphold right, justice and ideals.

When you're average, you're just as close to the bottom as you are the top.

We think in generalities, but we live in detail.

Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of life is to grasp as much as we can out of that infinitude.

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

I would be a billionaire if I was looking to be a selfish boss. That's not me.

But you can catch yourself entertaining habitually certain ideas and setting others aside; and that, I think, is where our personal destinies are largely decided.

Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.

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

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

Seek simplicity but distrust it.

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

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

Simple solutions seldom are. It takes a very unusual mind to undertake analysis of the obvious.